“The encryption with Skype telephone software … creates grave difficulties for us,” Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany’s Federal Police Office. “We can’t decipher it. That’s why we’re talking about source telecommunication surveillance — that is, getting to the source before encryption or after it’s been decrypted.”…
Ziercke said they were not asking Skype to divulge its encryption keys or leave “back doors open” for German and other country’s law enforcement authorities.
“There are no discussions with Skype. I don’t think that would help,” he said, adding that he did not want to harm the competitiveness of any company. “I don’t think that any provider would go for that.”
Ask someone named AT&T.
Spyware computer searches are illegal in Germany, where people are sensitive about police surveillance due to the history of the Nazis’ Gestapo secret police and the former East German Stasi.
Ziercke said worries were overblown and that on-line searches would need to be conducted only on rare occasions.
“We currently have 230 proceedings related to suspected Islamists,” Ziercke said. “I can imagine that in two or three of those we would like to do this.”
And, uh, how many computers and phone lines do you think our government spies on?
Screw the government. Screw AT&T. Screw the idiots who support this crap with their cowardly votes!
Horray for Skype.
ALL our internet tools need to have encryption built-in, transparently, as default.
… and it’s not just to stump the German police or even from the creeply spying Bush administration.
It’s to finally get a handle on spammers, scammers, ID thiefs and the gazillion others predators taking advantage of the openness of the internet.
C’mon geeks! This is your day to save the world!
I suggest you start with Thunderbird. All users of future releases of Thunderbird should have their email encrypted end-to-end, by default, with total transparency.
Then, build encryption into Firefox and Apache so that everyone using Firefox to access a Apace server is totally secure. The security shouldn’t just be the data but the government/ISP/IT guy at work should have no way of knowing what web sites you’re visiting.
THEN, you geeks need to build a $5 black box gizmo which makes our land lines secure. Eventually the technology needs to be built right into our phones.
@Greg
I am one of those IT guys and I hate to burst your bubble but encryption only encrypts the contents of your web browser session not the IP address of your destination. Now, if you want to disguise the destination of your traffic you will have to use something like Tor.
Forget Surveillance!!!! its a waste of time and money…there is always a way to communicate secretly encoded to a book fractral image times trillion…now all that money saved can be put to good use…race relations better schools sports facilities cycle ways list endless..11th hour film etc etc..
ex help …man women rich poor should be given an equal chance to become president….equal platform ..no propaganda…. just like Norway in fact…