skype claims they have no technical means to assist wiretapping

[Florian Weimer]

* Perry E. Metzger:

> Excerpt:
>
>      Jennifer Caukin, Skype's director of corporate communications
>      replied to us: "We have not received any subpoenas or court
>      orders asking us to perform a live interception or wiretap of
>      Skype-to-Skype communications. In any event, because of Skype's
>      peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would
>      not be able to comply with such a request."
>
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9963028-38.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheIconoclast

It's sort-of industry practice to wiretap peer-to-peer voice-over-IP
environments by asking the naming service not to signal the availability
of a direct, end-to-end, but to fall back to some media gateway (which
is there for interoperability with the phone network anyway).  I'm
surprised that is compliant with regulatory requirements, but
apparently, it is.

So, at that point, it wouldn't be "Skype-to-Skype" anymore.  It also
solves the problem of getting access to the media stream (which is the
difficult part for traditional VoIP systems, which are encrypted only in
the marketing brochures).

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