Skype denies wiretapping claims

Skype and Microsoft recently came under fire for not providing users with clarity as to whether the video chat service could be used by law enforcement for wiretapping of conversations.

Skype returned fire with a blog post by Mark Gillett, the company's chief operating officer. He said said his engineers changed the VoIP service's architecture to include "mega-supernodes" in the cloud back in 2010, a move to improve reliability rather than set up a set of hubs where user data might be more easily collected and passed onto cops, spooks and g-men:

"As part of our ongoing commitment to continually improve the Skype user experience, we developed supernodes which can be located on dedicated servers within secure datacenters. This has not changed the underlying nature of Skype's peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture, in which supernodes simply allow users to find one another (calls do not pass through supernodes). We believe this approach has immediate performance, scalability and availability benefits for the hundreds of millions of users that make up the Skype community."

The FBI have long complained that criminals, paedophiles and terrorists found refuge on Skype. Police using traditional wiretap technology became fed up with hearing jihadis or gang members cutting short phone calls and proposing to continue on Skype.

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