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Comment by lern_too_spel | Hacker News Reader

Snowden's leaks showed that Skype allowed governments to wiretap its video calls since at least 2010, when those wiretaps were ingested into PRISM. That is before the Microsoft acquisition.

It takes a minute of Google searching to debunk this conspiracy theory.

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The PRISM slide you're incorrectly referencing shows Skype collection beginning "2/6/11", which in our stupid American short-date format means June 2nd 2011. It's fine if you choose to believe that date has nothing to do with Microsoft's announced-in-May-2011 acquisition of a service that began operation in August 2003, but it's very rude of you to denigrate my completely reasonable observation as a "conspiracy theory". Enjoy your Skype calls :)

I'm not referring to a PRISM slide for when Skype wiretapping began. PRISM ingestion happens long after a system can be wiretapped but presumably contains data from the when the FBI first started wiretapping these systems. I'm referencing documents the Guardian claimed to have seen that said wiretapping work began in November 2010. Also, 2/6/2011 means February 6, 2011 in the American system. According to The Guardian:

"According to the NSA documents, work had begun on smoothly integrating Skype into Prism in November 2010, but it was not until 4 February 2011 that the company was served with a directive to comply signed by the attorney general.

"The NSA was able to start tasking Skype communications the following day, and collection began on 6 February."

It is not rude to point out misinformation, and your comment fits the definition of "conspiracy theory."

There's nothing dinigrating about a theory about a conspiracy being called a conspiracy theory and that reaction gets more and more curious the more I think about it. If you want people to take the idea of plots between the NSA and major companies seriously it seems counterproductive to stigmatise conspiracy theories.

It's a bad-faith term intended only to shut down conversations.

It is a term that has a specific meaning. You have a theory that there is a conspiracy between Microsoft and the NSA. No such conspiracy exists. Skype started to forward wiretap data to the FBI in 2010 (presumably from owned supernodes and POTS gateways), and Microsoft continued that work after the purchase. There is no evidence that either Skype or Microsoft worked with the NSA on Skype wiretaps, and there is no evidence that either took a multibillion dollar payout for it.

Microsoft become a PRISM provider in 2007 and Skype in 2011.

The only PRISM "provider" is the FBI, as Snowden's slides clearly show. The dates are when the integration work to ingest data (requested for individual accounts being wiretapped) from the various formats that the companies provide to the FBI completed.

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