Are you sure that the best way to hide the fact that you have found an attack against Skype is to advertise a contest with a billion dollar reward to anybody who can find the same attack (or any other one)?
But as soon as they use this evidence against someone in court, their cover will be blown. And, if they can break the encryption but refuse to use it to convict anyone, it's still safe for criminals to use.
We aren't dealing with a police agency, remember. We are dealing with a "national security" agency, and that phrase is an umbrella term that covers every type of shady business governments have engaged in since time immemorial. The NSA does not deal in "evidence" and "courts." It deals in "should we sic CIA assassins on this leader?" and "should we orchestrate a smear campaign against these nearly successful activists?" and other fun questions.
Has this really been established, or is it just presumed?
I vaguely remember reading something about the skype team saying they would "cooperate" with law enforcement officials, but I'm not sure if that meant actually listening in on encrypted conversations or just sharing the IPs and time of connections to servers.
In the US they are probably required to provide CALEA interception capabilities to law enforcement for their dial-out service, but I doubt they have some secret interception backdoor in the software itself.
If somebody who is reverse engineering Skype found it, and it would eventually be found, the company would be ruined.
I think you underestimate the importance of skype as a international means of communication, and overestimate the value most people place on privacy. When living abroad, it's the primary tool for keeping in touch with people back home or in other parts of the world. And why not? It's (mostly) free.
Even if skype came out and said they were recording every conversation, I don't know if all that many people would stop using it. There wasn't all that much outrage over immunity for the big telcos, for instance.
Or did you mean the company would be ruined for some other reason besides loss of reputation? Maybe I misunderstood the comment.
Yes, I may be overestimating the reaction that people would have but it's not so much about privacy as abusing the trust of their users. I think most people would consider it pretty dishonest for Skype to place backdoors in their client application so that intelligence agencies can spy on their conversations.
It's more intentionally malicious to distribute software with a backdoor than to do what AT&T did so I really think it would upset people more.
Remember the Sony 'rootkit' fiasco? And that wasn't even really harmful, just annoying.
I'm absolutely positive, no doubts whatsoever, totally sure that it means that they can't but by saying that they can't they're trying to get you to think that they can and want their opponents to use something else.
