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Comment by Herring | Hacker News Reader

skype already has a backdoor, google it.

The problem is network effects again.

Which is why my comment was highly dismissive of this article as anything but parroting of anti-privacy propaganda. I'd bet that these scary Taliban transmissions are being intercepted just fine.

Requiring an overt backdoor for law enforcement would just encourage people to move away from Skype, diminishing the value of whatever covert backdoors it has.

I see, I misread.

This is not something new. Law enforcement official have the ability to wiretap voice calls over landline and mobile. The issue is with the Voice calls that take place over the internet. I agree privacy is an issue here. However, we are missing the bigger cause here. These backdoors, if used genuinely can save lot of lives and stop crime and terrorism.

Or they can be abused, eg by china or by Bush's telecoms. I'd like to think the right to privacy isn't just for people we like, same as free speech. But this is irrelevant, voice is data & data can be encrypted, as was said earlier. Law enforcement will just have to adapt.

> These backdoors, if used genuinely can save lot of lives and stop crime and terrorism.

Don't forget kiddie porn and money laundering! They're feeling a little left out here.

"Bigger cause" ? Physics does not work that way. The only leverage over Skype is that it's closed source.

Crypto genie is not going back in the bottle.

Iam not sure if skype has a backdoor solution. rumors are that some folks have reverse engineered the client. So far, i have not heard anyone claiming to have succesfully reverse engineered the client

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