Soft32.com News
Published on Software, Security, Communications, Internet November 26, 2007, 8:13 am by Adrian Flucuş, Soft32
Officials in the German police, have complained that Skype calls cannot be intercepted and listen to, which makes the police work more difficult.
Everybody knows about phone tapping. Altough most of us have heard about it from the movies, we all know that this is what the police does in order to find out what are the bad men’s intentions and eventually send them to jail based on those evidence. Well, those days might be over as the VoIP calls are becoming more frequent even among the bad guys.
According to German president of police, Joerg Ziercke, the combination of strong encryption and the methods inherent to VoIP makes wiretapping impossible for the police. “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 told Reuters.
Skype doesn’t use an open-source protocol for its VoIP service so the way the voice is encrypted before transmission is not available to the public. Also, the information is send over public networks in a series of small packets which take different routes over the network thus making them impossible to track.
Ziercke also told that the Police also needs legal means to perform online scanning of remote hard-drives. This would allow the authorities to install trojan-horse spyware programs remotely on targeted computers and find any information that is relevant for the investigation. Currently, the german law prohibits the use of spyware programs in police investigation.
