Skype backdoor speculation and Data surveillance of today

Friday

According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.
This has been confirmed to heise online by a number of the parties present at the meeting. Skype declined to give a detailed response to specific enquiries from heise online as to whether Skype contains a back door and whether specific clients allowing access to a system or a specific key for decrypting data streams exist. The response from the eBay subsidiary's press spokesman was brief, "Skype does not comment on media speculation. Skype has no further comment at this time." There have been rumours of the existence of a special listening device which Skype is reported to offer for sale to interested states.

The article continues to describe how the Austrian interior ministry asked to install network bridges and Linux computers in their network centers. These would be used to copy and filter data traffic and forward it via an encrypted connection. Read the full article.

Mass surveillance is never in proportion to the problems it can actually solve. The wire-tapping law in Sweden has also been largely disputed.

The government’s arguments are not helped by the past record of the FRA. On July 1, Säpo, the Swedish security police, announced it would launch an investigation into whether FRA illegally collected data on Swedes and their communications and then stored it for up to 10 years. The inquiry was sparked by the news that an FRA employee may have leaked confidential documents to the media.

Sections of business have also voiced their opposition to the law, as it compromises their and their customers’ security. Telia Sonera, the region’s biggest telecommunications company, as well as Google, claim that the law is the most intrusive in Europe, likening it to the domestic spying programme of the Bush administration. In April of this year, Telia Sonera moved its servers from Sweden to Finland in anticipation of the passage of the law, in order to safeguard against surveillance of its Finnish customers. (Source: wsws.org)

Building backdoors and putting listening devices in place actually poses a security risk (besides the privacy issue). A few years ago, hackers broke into a Greece telephone network (IEE Spectrum) and subverted its built-in wiretapping features for their own purposes.

Bonus: Tracking citizens through their Bluetooth devices (guardian.co.uk)