Internal intelligence agencies hungry for deeper cooperation from Skype
While already giving intelligence services access to private data without a court order, some Russian experts say, Skype is still being pressured into registering as a telecom agency, allowing intelligence to operate around a series of legal loopholes. Intelligence services have for years have been monitoring Skype communications, several participants in the Russian information security industry have told Russian newspaper Vedomosti. According to security experts, access to correspondence and Skype conversations within the Russian intelligence community does not always go through the court system – it is often obtained on a “simple request.” After Microsoft acquired Skype in May 2011, it updated its software with a technology allowing “legitimate wiretapping,” Maksim Emm, CEO of Peak Systems, told the publication. Since then, any user account can be switched to a special mode in which the encryption keys that were previously generated on a user’s mobile device or computer would be generated on Skype’s server.