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Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

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Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#61

Post by Fnoord »

mikorym wrote: post #59

I may be misinformed, but when those Estonian programmers wrote Skype it was at the time both decentrialised and encrypted by default. Is that not the case anymore? A pre-emtive apology if I remember the story incorrectly.

> I may be misinformed, but when those Estonian programmers wrote Skype it was at the time both decentrialised and encrypted by default. Is that not the case anymore?

That is indeed not the case anymore, as per the PRISM program, which was leaked during the Snowden leaks of 2013.

From Wikipedia [1] the following three quotes:

"The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012"

"Internal NSA presentation slides included in the various media disclosures show that the NSA could unilaterally access data and perform "extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information" with examples including email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP chats (such as Skype), file transfers, and social networking details."

"According to The Guardian, NSA had access to chats and emails on Hotmail.com and Skype because Microsoft had "developed a surveillance capability to deal" with the interception of chats, and "for Prism collection against Microsoft email services will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption.""

Regarding that last quote, Wikipedia mentions these sources [2] [3] [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

[3] https://www.rt.com/usa/microsoft-nsa-snowden-leak-971/

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#62

Post by Frondo »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #5
_Understated_ wrote: post #4

I think we have to assume at this point that all online communication tools owned by for-profit mega-corps are compromised and that they can and do listen/analyse everything. I have long assumed that with Whatsapp... I honestly don't believe that it's as secure as it used to be: Facebook'a raison d'etre is all about data gathering. Also, when I read a WhatsApp message on my phone, it's unencrypted as I see it on the…

Specifically, you should realize anything that companies say is done with "AI" is probably in some part done by poorly paid contractors. And not always on the analysis end, for example: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2019/05/28/25-of-go... There's something incredibly dystopian by using humans as part of a process you literally tell people is entirely machines.

This reminds me of the great first novel of Russian author Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra. The protagonist joins the Soviet space program (fully automated moon exploration!) and

[spoilers ahead]

learns that the full automation is physical labor by cosmonauts at every stage of the process. No spoilers about the end, it's even better.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#63

Post by tjoff »

jmull wrote: post #38
human20190310 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nitpicking. If the word "analyze" was chosen because the word "eavesdrop" would result in users leaving the platform, and eavesdropping is what they're actually doing , then they're obscuring their actions with a euphemism.

Well, eavesdrop means secretly listening to a conversation. If they communicate it in a reasonable way, it's not eavesdropping.

Well, since they don't communicate it in a reasonable way it is eavesdropping then.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#64

Post by lawnchair_larry »

Spooky23 wrote: post #28
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pretty silly. For one thing, it was already owned domestically before MS bought it. Second, you think MS spends 8.5 billion plus untild engineering resources and overhead as a favor to the US government?

Why not? That was immediately before O365, and at that point BPOS/Exchange online was starting to get traction with some governments. Microsoft was also ramping their OCS/VoIP business. Government is a huge market for O365, they were able to get ATOs and go conquer most states and federal agencies. They also bought a huge VoIP play, learned how to operationalize it, quickly spun it into a service component that serve…

I don’t expect to change your mind, but this just isn’t how things work. MS are not a front for the government. Also, you are giving the government far too much credit in terms of how they are organized to even dream that a deal like that could work. Not to mention it would be a massive scandal when it inevitably leaked. This is the same company that famously refused to backdoor bitlocker and fairly recently has been suing the US government to fight against court orders to ha d over data. I suppose you think that’s all a charade to trick the public though...

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#65

Post by AlexandrB »

dmix wrote: post #40

So does Twillio... not surprising at all when there's no encryption and they need to debug real phone calls routed all over the world which is not an easy task. As long as they're only spot checking and not browsing through any one persons calls for no reason I don't see why it's a big deal. It's mostly business lines anyway. That said, they should have some protocols and controls in place for listening to any calls,…

> As long as they're only spot checking and not browsing through any one persons calls for no reason I don't see why it's a big deal.

Go back 50 years and apply this same logic to AT&T instead of Skype to see how far our expectations of privacy have degraded.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#66

Post by lawnchair_larry »

imglorp wrote: post #21
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s pretty silly. For one thing, it was already owned domestically before MS bought it. Second, you think MS spends 8.5 billion plus untild engineering resources and overhead as a favor to the US government?

Yep. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-...

That relates to court orders, which have been served on every company. It was also horribly misreported, with every affected company saying pretty publicly that this wasn’t accurate.

There is a difference between being compelled to spend billions on a company just to provide wiretapping for feds, and buying a company with a wildly successful product then being asked to handle wiretaps after the fact. One of those is ridiculous, the other is expected.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#67

Post by 317070 »

est31 wrote: post #60
317070 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use jit.si as replacement for Skype. It's in browser, encrypted, p2p and EFF approved. I don't know if they have apps, but as far as I know their server code is on github.

Note that jit.si is only encrypted in the sense that Skype is encrypted, aka transport stream encrypted. The server needs access to the decrypted video stream so that it can do split screen. See this thread for details: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet/issues/409 I personally use jitsi because it is FLOSS software and it's less likely to send conversation contents to the NSA or other dragnet surveillance entities.…

Aha, I did not know that! On the plus side, you could set up your own server, having the guarantee.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#68

Post by iamnotacrook »

darkcha0s wrote: post #19

>Although Skype's website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform's services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans. I'm sorry, but isn't this just nitpicking? Just because they don't say how it's analyzed doesn't make this a scandal.

"Shall we make it clear that no humans listened, and that 'analyze' meant via algorithms?"

"No, leave it as it is; nobody's that concerned about their privacy being violated by other people listening to recordings captured by Alexa, Siri etc."

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#69

Post by nabnob »

jasonmorton wrote: post #39

Can anyone recommend a good open-source chat and call solution? I'm looking for something I can run on my own server to support friends and family, with an iOS and Android app. It doesn't have to support more than one or two video calls at a time. I figure this is sadly the long term solution.

I use Riot - matrix-based chat client, has group video calls, and also offers end-to-end encryption.

Re: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

#70

Post by poslathian »

AlexandrB wrote: post #65
dmix wrote: post #40

So does Twillio... not surprising at all when there's no encryption and they need to debug real phone calls routed all over the world which is not an easy task. As long as they're only spot checking and not browsing through any one persons calls for no reason I don't see why it's a big deal. It's mostly business lines anyway. That said, they should have some protocols and controls in place for listening to any calls,…

> As long as they're only spot checking and not browsing through any one persons calls for no reason I don't see why it's a big deal. Go back 50 years and apply this same logic to AT&T instead of Skype to see how far our expectations of privacy have degraded.

I thought 50+ years ago you had operators punching in and out of calls on as as needed basis....
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