Ignorant Yank here. Is Belgium generally known for being anti-cryptography? And if so, when did that happen? And why? I thought they were an 'anything goes' kind of country.
Belgian court says Skype must provide interception facilities
Skype has failed in its appeal against a 2016 fine in Belgium for failing to help authorities tap calls in a criminal investigation, with the court saying it must comply with the country's telecommunications laws. Last year, a court in Mechelen imposed the €30,000 fine, because Skype was unable to hand over anything more than …
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Thursday 16th November 2017 06:57 GMT Voland's right hand
Is Belgium generally known for being anti-cryptography?
Not really.
The case is not about cryptography. It is about running a communications service and does it constitute a telecom operation as defined in law. A telecom operator in nearly all countries must provide lawful intercept, usually based on court order. The side effect of this is that you are not allowed to run a completely opaque service as an operator. Users can run it. Companies can supply software to them to do so. Telcos and Service operators cannot.
In any case - it is old news as far as MSFT is concerned as their service is now cloud-centric and with no end-to-end encryption. So while they probably could not provide intercept on the old Skype protocol, they have no issues doing it today.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 08:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Belgium generally known for being anti-cryptography? And if so, when did that happen? And why? I thought they were an 'anything goes' kind of country.
God no. The Flemish part, OK, but the French side of it would not stand for it, for historic reasons. The French used to be in control, but those pesky Flemish people have worked out that they are actually generating the majority of the money in the country but the French side spends most of it, and ever since the peasants have been a tad on the unruly side, resulting inmore and more attempts to clamp down (which is why the government falls over with the frequency of a tourist trying to keep up with the drinking of the average Glaswegian).
The funny part is that Skype already IS intercepted, they just won't admit to it. Now there's an excuse of "generating a preview", but it's been quite a while since people in Germany discovered that a weblink in Skype messaging gets visited in under 10 seconds when sent (in my experience it's usually within a second).
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Thursday 16th November 2017 08:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
"The funny part is that Skype already IS intercepted, they just won't admit to it.,"
They do admit to it. It's not controversial for a phone service to be intercepted, and In most countries it's a legal requirement with a court order.
"since people in Germany discovered that a weblink in Skype messaging gets visited in under 10 seconds when sent (in my experience it's usually within a second)."
That would be the malware scanning taking a look before sending it on...
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Thursday 16th November 2017 09:24 GMT Voland's right hand
discovered that a weblink in Skype messaging gets visited in under 10 seconds
That is normal as the new Skype attempts to generate a inline preview. All the other usual suspects do it too.
Now, what else do they do with this information as well as how they relate it to you personally and how do they map it onto advertising are a different story.
This is one of the many reasons why MSFT killed the p2p early skype protocol. It was observing how F***book, Google, etc are correlating messaging with web views in a way usable for printing money and it could not print money the same way. From that point on the days of p2p skype were numbered.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 06:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
Still better than ours want
As long as each targetted investigation requires a warrant it's far better than Britain or America are demanding.
I mean, Bojo would inevitably say that's okay for a tiny country because they've got few enough connections to be able to do this on a case by case basis, but that's because he can't let anything go by without a pop at funny foreigners. In reality we should all have enough court facilities for our population.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 07:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still better than ours want
As long as each targetted investigation requires a warrant it's far better than Britain or America are demanding.
A targetted investigation requires a warrant or court order in the U.K. There's an annual Parliamentary report on the matter that counts up their usage rates for you, and reports on cock ups, missing warrants, etc (of which there are seemingly very few).
And for the sake of clarity, a warrant is not an order to do something, it is merely official permission to do something that is normally illegal. If I as a private individual am issued a warrant to tap my neighbours phone line (extremely unlikely circumstances) then I could do so if I wanted to.
On the other hand a court order is something that must be obeyed; you can go to jail for not doing what you're told.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 07:56 GMT gypsythief
Re: Still better than ours want
"A targetted investigation requires a warrant or court order in the U.K. "
Yes. Yes it does. A targeted investigation does indeed. So, why bother targeting? Way too much work, old boy. Let's just introduce the Snooper's Charter and slurp it. Slurp it all!!! Why, there's nothing targeted about that!
So yes, unless Belgium has its own Snooper's Charter, it is indeed better than what Britain or America are up to.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 13:41 GMT JimboSmith
Re: Still better than ours want
Or just provide the facilities for the Americans to it for us via Echelon...
Oh come on I mean It's not like BT have got cables running into Menwith Hill carrying 100,000 telephone calls concurrently. Nor that (in the late 90's) they'd admit to this and send evidence and their then head of emergency planning (as a witness) to court and admit this. The case was an appeal by two convicted female trespassers into the American Spy base. BT had to send another solicitor to withdraw evidence submitted and shut up their own witness. That fiasco earned a rebuke for the company and the witness from the judge who said:
"If I had a burglar alarm system, I would now think twice about having it operated by BT"
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Thursday 16th November 2017 12:28 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Still better than ours want
"A targetted investigation requires a warrant or court order in the U.K."
One issue here is the issuing of a warrant by some agency other than a court. For instance if someone goes to Rudd for a warrant because someone's using hashtags she'll issue it without a second thought (in fact, without a first thought for obvious reasons).
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Thursday 16th November 2017 08:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still better than ours want
As long as each targetted investigation requires a warrant it's far better than Britain or America are demanding.
My dear boy, you have no idea just how corrupt Belgium is (admittedly still less of a mess than Malta at present, but it's vile). A warrant requirement is not really a barrier.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 06:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Belgium is a tiny country
Pretty easy for Microsoft, and anyone else caught in this net, to simply not offer Skype and any other services that Belgium wants to regulate.
So assuming they chase all the US players away, how do they plan to go after services based in countries without extradition treaties such as Russia and whose owners don't have any legal presence in Belgium and thus can ignore the courts with impunity, like Telegram's app?
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Thursday 16th November 2017 08:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Belgium is a tiny country
Bzzt - correction. Your sentence is incomplete.
"Belgium is a tiny country and is part of the EU"
As a matter of fact, it hosts most of the functions. Belgium is a test market for a lot of things, exactly because it's small with a mixed population. This is, for instance, why cars are cheaper there. A side effect of that is that things that happen in Belgium that are not a function of the eternal language conflict have a nasty habit of migrating into EU level problems, so if I were Microsoft I'd use those lobbyists that they already infested Brussels with and deal with this pretty pronto or it could get very ugly..
.. which would greatly amuse me. But I do have a bad sense of humour :).
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Thursday 16th November 2017 08:17 GMT bazza
Re: Belgium is a tiny country
This is likely part of an eventual Europe wide reconsideration of OTT services as telcos. That includes Apple (FaceTime), WhatsApp (everything), Facebook (Messenger), Google (surely they have a message service somewhere but I don't bother learning the names because hey keep throwing them away), Instagram, Line, Snapchat, BBM, etc.
If that happens then the newly anointed Telcos will have to strike a balance between complying with LI laws and their current marketing / public positions vis a vis "privacy". Making a big fuss about privacy now may suit the public mood, but may put them out of business later when their privacy conscious users flee once they introduce LI systems.
Withdrawing from lil ol Belgium is one thing, from the whole of Europe dents the bottom line quite a bit. Belgium has simply set a precedent...
Skype's original peer to peer architecture is of course highly resistant to this kind of thing. An open source equivalent with no corporate backer would be very difficult to intercept. But there's no money in it for anyone, so no one organisation with sufficient marketing clout will ever promote such a thing.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 11:07 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: why does iplaye implement geo blocking
Because a lot of the content available is only licensed for the UK Market.
I expect that a test case will resolve this eventually but probably not before BREXIT.
The copyright holders of the programmes broadcast want their pound of flesh from every country where their thing is shown/streamed. The amounts vary by country.
I foesee a time when iPlayer has no content and the service dies.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 13:46 GMT Michael Habel
Re: why does iplaye implement geo blocking
Well the nuked Top Gear... And now their doing the same with Doctor Who*. Didn't they also lose Bake Off as well? Seems all they have left are shows about Fleamarket (Bootsales), and reprocessed homes under the B&Hammer. Yeah I don't think I'm missing much either.
And since the last time I checked BBC4 was nothing but, bunch of repeates from >2010. Again saw all that crap before they cut the spot beam down. Thus ending my viewing of those Channels via Freesat.
*I shall probably stop watching this nonsense after the Christmas Special. What a shame the BBC wasted such a great actor for this role.... But, this could be said of anyone post Davidson.
That said this was One Shark too many...
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Thursday 16th November 2017 22:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
So what stops Microsoft from spinning off Skype?
Make it a separate company that doesn't do business in the EU, and is just very well supported by Windows. Facebook could do the same for Messenger since it is already a separate app, and so forth.
Corporations can fight this sort of thing with corporate structure and the EU will twist themselves into knots with a lot of unintended consequences trying to go after them.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 12:44 GMT Doctor Syntax
Re: Belgium is a tiny country
"Pretty easy for Microsoft, and anyone else caught in this net, to simply not offer Skype and any other services that Belgium wants to regulate."
...and explain to customers why. Then let the Belgian govt. field their public's response. If it's a big issue then it'll be a big issue for the govt. If it isn't MS can quietly reintroduce the service.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 09:23 GMT Martin Audley
Seems to me that WhatsApp could happily respond by simply offering the telecommunications authorities recordings of the encrypted data flows, and saying "There you go - now you've got everything we have.. Deal with it".
WhatsApp cannot decrypt those - and nor (even with GCHQ's supercomputers applied to the problem) could the authorities.
Without the government banning P2P or P2C encryption (which would, obviously, kill banking) there's not really any other alternative.
Skype, with their broken encryption, isn't used by anyone who cares about privacy anyway.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 09:32 GMT TheVogon
"Skype cannot decrypt those"
For Skype user to Skype user they might be able to get away with that. But when they pass a call to the PSTN they would have to intercept it... Skype's model currently terminates encryption at the servers though, which is fine for most of us, but terrorists, etc would be after end-to-end encryption which would require a different design.
Currently that's not an issue for most corporates because Skype for business terminates the secure connections from outside clients within their network and under their control. However, if they move to the Office 365 hosted Skype model then it becomes something to consider as it might be possible for say the NSA given sufficient resourcing to tap such calls / messages...
" and nor (even with GCHQ's supercomputers applied to the problem) could the authorities."
Bearing in mind the holes (some deliberate) we have now found in previously considered secure encryption and hashing algorithms I would not want to bet on that...
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Thursday 16th November 2017 09:38 GMT Tigra 07
Create a technicality...
When installing and choosing country/language Microsoft should leave Belgium off the list.
No longer targeting customers in market = no need to bow to the court's demands (by their own admission). Microsoft just needs to release a statement criticising the law and announce they're pulling out of the market.
Belgian customers can simply choose Germany as their country and enjoy uninterrupted access to Skype, while their anti crypto Gov take flak.
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Thursday 16th November 2017 19:24 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Create a technicality...
"No longer targeting customers in market = no need to bow to the court's demands (by their own admission). "
As mentioned further up, Belgium is part of the EU and rulings such as this have a habit of moving up the chain and becoming established as EU wide precedent. Would MS be prepared to stop offering Skype in the whole of the EU?
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Friday 17th November 2017 02:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Skype impenetrable encryption
"The Microsoft-owned VoIP and messaging system operated in a peer-to-peer model at the time, making its encryption impenetrable to the company and law enforcement authorities alike."
'Skype worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video and audio conversations.'