But changes allowing police surveillance of online chats had been made since late last year, a knowledgeable industry official said Wednesday.
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In the United States, such requests require a court order, though in other nations rules vary. Skype has more than 600 million users, with some in nearly every nation in the world. Political dissidents relied on it extensively during the Arab Spring to communicate with journalists, human rights workers and each other, in part because of its reputation for security.
Skype’s resistance to government monitoring, part of the company ethos when European engineers founded it in 2003, resulted from both uncommonly strong encryption and a key technical feature: Skype calls connected computers directly rather than routing data through central servers, as many other Internet-based communication systems do. That makes it more difficult for law enforcement to intercept the call. The authorities long have been able to wiretap Skype calls to traditional phones.
The company created a law-enforcement compliance team not long after eBay bought the company in 2005, putting it squarely under the auspices of U.S. law. The company was later sold to private investors before Microsoft bought it in May 2011 for $8.5 billion.
The new ownership had at least an indirect role in the security changes. Skype has endured periodic outages, including a disastrous one in December 2010. Company officials concluded that a more robust system was needed if the company was going to reach its potential.
Industry officials said the resulting push for the creation of so-called “supernodes,” which routed some data through centralized servers, made greater cooperation with law enforcement authorities possible.
The access to personal information and online chats, which are kept in Skype’s systems for 30 days, remains short of what some law enforcement officials have requested.
The FBI, whose officials have complained to Congress about the “going dark” problem, issued a statement Wednesday night saying it couldn’t comment on a particular company or service but that surveillance of conversations “requires review and approval by a court. It is used only in national security matters and to combat the most serious crimes.”
Hackers in recent years have demonstrated that it was possible to penetrate Skype, but it’s not clear how often this happened. Microsoft won a patent in June 2011 for “legal intercept” of Skype and similar Internet-based voice and video systems. It is also possible, experts say, to monitor Skype chats as well as voice and video by hacking into a user’s computer, doing an end run around encryptions.
“If someone wants to compromise a Skype communication, all they have to do is hack the endpoint — the person’s computer or tablet or mobile phone, which is very easy to do,” said Tom Kellermann, vice president of cybersecurity for Trend Micro, a cloud security company.
Some industry officials, however, say Skype loses some competitive edge in the increasingly crowded world of Internet-based communications systems if users no longer see it as more private than rival services.
“This is just making Skype like every other communication service, no better, no worse,” said one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Skype used to be very special because it really was locked up. Now it’s like Superman without his powers.”
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