Monday, January 12, 2009

Unbuggable Skype?

James Bamford's recent book, "The Shadow Factory" (which I've reviewed for this Sunday's NYT) makes a convincing, if often disjointed case that just about everything we say or do online is monitored by the government. As an expatriate who communicates with a lot of characters who are not popular with their own government, or ours, I take it for granted that any or all of my conversations, whether spoken or written, are liable to be tapped. So I was interested to read in Bamford's book (pp 255-56) that Skype calls are "virtually unbuggable" because the security "is achieved by end-to-end encryption for all calls to other members. Such technology makes it possible to fight back against the proliferating eavesdropping factories."
Whew. Let's hope.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You can read more about Skype security on our website - and you're absolutely right. End-to-end encryption makes Skype-to-Skype calls completely secure and private.