Periodically this topic of should we extend legal intercept capability to IP Communications is raised and more often than not the slant of the argument is that IP Communications should be free of any regulatory requirement. Invariably one of the supportive point is that the participants could encode the data exchange thereby thwarting the objective of interception. It is widely held that Skype’s encryption is the most difficult to break and so Skype is the poster child. Phil Wolff reports in Skype Journal that a German company is suggesting that they have developed a capability to infect a target’s PC so that the communication is intercepted in the PC itself and that too before the transmission is encrypted. At least in my reading it looks like Phil is suggesting that the German authorities have signed onto this. But I have my own reservations. First it is not clear whether they can infect stand alone devices. If not, won’t the targets who are professional miscreants use Skype devices, rather than a PC? Second, the infected PC has to transmit the intercepted communication to the LEA at some point. Since the targets can easily monitor the traffic flowing across their router, they can easily infer that they are targets. Once of the CALEA requirement is that the targets shouldn’t be able to discern that they are indeed targets.
In certain cases, the LEAs may not need access such an elaborate setup. It so happened that in a recent case, the Italian authorities needed to locate one of the suspects. “Soon after the murder, Guede (the suspect) left Perugia, but he kept checking Facebook for messages from friends. The Communications Police arranged for one of those to contact Guede using Skype from their office, and as the two chatted, the cops traced Guede to a computer in Dusseldorf.”
Posted by aswath at February 17, 2008 10:42 PM