[Microsoft
has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of
what the issues would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s
plans, who like several people interviewed for this story spoke on the
condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue
publicly. The company has “a long track record of working successfully with law
enforcement here and internationally,” he added.]
By Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima
 |
| Image courtesy: Google |
Skype, the
online phone service long favored by political dissidents, criminals and others
eager to communicate beyond the reach of governments, has expanded its
cooperation with law enforcement authorities to make online chats and other
user information available to police, said industry and government officials
familiar with the changes.
Surveillance of the audio and
video feeds remains impractical — even when courts issue warrants, say industry
officials with direct knowledge of the matter. But that barrier could
eventually vanish as Skype becomes one of the world’s most popular forms of
telecommunication.
The changes to online chats,
which are written messages conveyed almost instantaneously between users,
result in part from technical upgrades to Skype that were instituted to address
outages and other stability issues since Microsoft bought the company last
year. Officials of the United States
Microsoft has approached the
issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the issues
would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s plans, who like
several people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity
because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The company has
“a long track record of working successfully with law enforcement here and
internationally,” he added.
The changes, which give the
authorities access to addresses and credit card numbers, have drawn quiet
applause in law enforcement circles but
hostility from many activists and analysts.
Authorities had for years
complained that Skype’s encryption and other features made tracking drug lords,
pedophiles and terrorists more difficult. Jihadis recommended the service on
online forums. Police listening to traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear
wary suspects say to one another, “Hey, let’s talk on Skype.”
Hacker groups and privacy
experts have been speculating for months that Skype had changed its
architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor, and many
blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying with legal
government requests in countries around the world.
“The issue is, to what extent
are our communications being purpose-built to make surveillance easy?” said
Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility, a digital
privacy group. “When you make it easy to do, law enforcement is going to want
to use it more and more. If you build it, they will come.’’
Skype was slow to clarify the
situation, issuing a statement recently that said, “As was true before the
Microsoft acquisition, Skype cooperates with law enforcement agencies as is
legally required and technically feasible.”
But changes allowing police
surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a
knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.
In the United States
Skype’s resistance to
government monitoring, part of the company ethos when European engineers
founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong encryption and a key
technical feature: Skype calls connected computers directly rather than routing
data through central servers, as many other Internet-based communication
systems do. That makes it more difficult for law enforcement to intercept the
call. The authorities long have been able to wiretap Skype calls to traditional
phones.
The company created a
law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay bought the company in 2005,
putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S.
The new ownership had at least
an indirect role in the security changes. Skype has endured periodic outages,
including a disastrous one in December 2010. Company officials concluded that a
more robust system was needed if the company was going to reach its potential.
Industry officials said the
resulting push for the creation of so-called “supernodes,” which routed some
data through centralized servers, made greater cooperation with law enforcement
authorities possible.
The access to personal
information and online chats, which are kept in Skype’s systems for 30 days,
remains short of what some law enforcement officials have requested.
The FBI, whose officials have
complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement
Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service
but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a
court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most
serious crimes.”
Hackers in recent years have
demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate Skype, but it’s not clear how
often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in June 2011 for “legal intercept”
of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and video systems. It is also
possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as well as voice and video by
hacking into a user’s computer, doing an end run around encryptions.
“If someone wants to compromise
a Skype communication, all they have to do is hack the endpoint — the person’s
computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is very easy to do,” said Tom
Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro, a cloud security
company.
Some industry officials, however,
say Skype loses some competitive edge in the increasingly crowded world of
Internet-based communications systems if users no longer see it as more private
than rival services.
“This is just making Skype like
every other communication service, no better, no worse,” said one industry
official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Skype used to be very
special because it really was locked up. Now it’s like Superman without his
powers.”
NARENDRA MODI DEFENDS HIS ACTIONS IN 2002 RIOTS
[Shahid Siddiqui, editor of the Urdu-language weekly newspaper Nai Duniya, recently spoke to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi in a rare interview. During the hour long conversation, Mr. Modi defended his actions during the 2002 riots in his state that left hundreds dead, discussed the long court battles that followed and asked why Gujarat is being "targeted" by critics.]
Mr. Modi is
considered one of the Bharatiya Janata Party's strongest candidates for prime
minister in the upcoming 2014 elections, but the legacy of the Gujarat riots
has also made him one of India's most controversial and divisive politicians.
Mr. Siddiqui, a former member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh, supplied an
audio file of the interview to India Ink. The interview was translated from
Urdu and excerpted by Raksha
Kumar.
Q.
There are a
lot of questions on the riots for the past 20 years. Those who were burnt in
the train in Godhra, their bodies were brought back to Ahmedabad. Why did you
decide to do this? Did you not understand the repercussions of this?
A.
I have
answered this question in detail to the SIT [Special Investigation Team] and
the Supreme Court. No matter whose body it is, it needs to be returned to the
families, right? It was not right for everyone to go to Godhra where there was
tension. The second thing is that this train was going to Ahmedabad, and the
passengers were all going to Ahmebadad. So how do you get the bodies to reach
their families?
Q.
You could
have silently brought it to the hospitals and handed them over.
A.
That is
exactly how it happened. (laughs)
Q.
Didn't you
take them out on a procession?
A.
No. Listen
to the truth. There is no place in Godhra to keep so many bodies, it is an
administrative decision as to how to manage these? Now, all the bodies had to
go to north [Ahmedabad], so the question was do we shift it individually or as
a huge lot? Do we shift it in the morning or at night? The administration felt
that we should shift it at night to reduce tension. The civil hospital in
Ahmedabad is congested. And in 2001, it was in the outskirts. So, 16 bodies
were brought into the civil hospital. There was no procession.
Q.
When the
riots broke out, you would have gotten the information that people are dying?
What did you do to stop it?
A.
We announced
a curfew, appealed to people to be peaceful. My first appeal was to Godhra, to
let the police do their duty. The entire police force was asked to get on this
job. There had never been a riot this big in India
Let me tell
you what happened in the first 72 hours:
There hasn't
been even one police gun shot, no lathi charge. There was lathi charge where
Indira Gandhi's dead body was kept. They did it there to control the crowds.
But, here people were arrested in advance.
Q.
But your
officials, police and some in the media reported you having told the people to
vent out their anger in the first 48 hours? Even Haren Pandya [the late home
minister of the state] had said that.
A.
The Supreme
Court asked for an investigation to be conducted. We should trust that.
Q.
Did you tell
the police to stop the rioting at any cost?
A.
Of course!
There are shoot at sight orders I gave the police. That is public.
Q.
Even at that
time I had heard that people were identified and burnt, as though the whole
thing was pre-planned.
A.
It is all a
lie. Instead, think about how many Muslims were protected then! If they were to
be killed systematically, who would have been spared today?
Q.
But they say
you were in the control room.
A.
The SC
[Supreme Court] team has investigated this. Wait until their report is
submitted.
Q.
Did you go
to the refugee camps yourself?
A.
I went
everywhere and investigated. There used to be PILs [public interest litigation]
in the Gujarat High Court very often those days. And some judgements say that
the best facilities were provided to the refugees.
Q.
What did the
PM say to you at that point?
A.
There is a
video on that. Atalji [Atal Bihari Vajpayee] said that he has trust in me.
Q.
Senior
Congress leaders including Rajiv Gandhi apologized after 1984 [communal riots].
And [Jagdish] Tytler was made to quit politics. You haven't regretted your
actions or apologized until now. It has been 10 years. You should have done it
as a head of state.
A.
You should
see the statements I made at that point. From that you will understand what
Modi thinks and believes. There was a 2005 interview of mine with Prabhu
Chawla. He asked me the same question and I told him, why should I apologize?
If a government is responsible for this, then it should be hanged in the middle
of the road. And they should be hanged as a deterrent - so that no
administrator dares to do this again. They should not be forgiven, because that
is encouraging the crime. If Modi has sinned, then Modi should be hanged. But,
even after trying sincerely to save many lives, some people want to badmouth me
due to political reasons, then I cant answer them.
Q.
Is there
some sorrow in your heart about what happened? That you couldn't stop it?
A.
First, I
think I managed to stop the rioting. I will not admit that I couldn't.
Q.
If a
correspondent of mine gives me wrong information and I print it, then I, as an
editor, will apologize. There will be a case against me, not him.
A.
I will give
you all the documents with my statements. And if you are convinced that I was
not involved in it, then you should also publish that you were harsh on me.
Then you should say that for the past 10 years we have defamed Modi and you
should apologize to me.
Q.
Even after
the riots, your administration was not willing to deliver justice until the
Supreme Court intervened. There was no SIT, the accused were all acquitted.
A.
You are
mistaken. The SIT deals with only 8-9 cases, here there have been thousands of
FIRs [First Information Report] and arrests. Not one person was punished in
1984 riots. Justice has been delivered in more than 50 cases in my state. Only
Best Bakery and Bilkis Bano cases have been moved to other states.
Q.
Why were
there so many fake encounters in your admin?
A.
Let me tell
you what is happening in the state where you are an MP [Member of Parliament]
from - Uttar Pradesh.
Mayawati had
said she made 396 encounters to maintain normalcy. In my state there were just
12 encounters.
The national
human rights commission has said that in the last 10 years (in this country)
400 have been fake. There is an appeal in the supreme court that these should
be re-investigated. So, it is a national issue, why is Gujarat
being targeted. If you want to talk about Gujarat ,
talk about UP , talk about the rest of the country.
