howdy seth. it's nice to see people calling out skype since i think it likely the service has been co-opted for many years, long before they are listed as havin

howdy seth. it's nice to see people calling out skype since i think it likely the service has been co-opted for many years, long before they are listed as having participated with PRISM. i stopped using it for anything but "casual" comms back in ~2005. as you point out, your focus is on the legal nature of improving the encryption. you mention CALEA, which i'm quoting here for clarity "A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication." you are right to point out that skype, under the current laws, is not likely to be considered a "telecommunications carrier". however, they do provide a bridge to the PSTN and this may be part of the legal issue. i suspect they are referencing the yet-to-be-public CALEA II, which may very well require services like skype to be preemptively backdoored for the FBI, etc. i see skype's current backdoor situation and their comments that you cite as more of a PR/damage control dance than anything. none of the companies that participated in PRISM did/can admit their participation. everyone who does cooperate with the intel services is going to concoct some reason they "had" to cooperate, whether it's true or not. to me, all of this PRISM and CALEA II nonsense is a reminder that unless a software product is open source, you're unlikely to have any kind of guarantee or expectation of privacy.