In the early evening of March 5, 2012, in Cairo, Egyptian revolutionaries stormed the siege Secret police called the State Security Investigations Service (SSI), a building known as “the capital of hell” because of its reputation as a place where ruthless police have tortured prisoners.
Inside, the demonstrators found intact and shredded documents, torture devices, hard drives and CDs and DVDs – all documenting nightmarish torture and generalized surveillance.
Among the documents, the demonstrators I found a memorandum Written in Arabic by SSI officers on a mysterious software called Finfisher, directed by the British company Gamma International.
The officers reported that Finfisher was a “high -level hacking system” with several capacities, including the possibility of accessing reception boxes by e -mail, to download “spy files” on the target device, to follow their communications, to obtain a “complete control” on the devices of hacked targets and – crucially – by documenting their “success in piracy” Netwage, which was billed.
In the early 2010s, Skype was the most popular internet call application in the world, not just in Egypt.
Launched in 2003, Skype has promised its users Unprecedented confidentiality, with calls “highly secure with end -to -end encryption”, which – in theory – – made it impossible for internet hackers or spies to read the discussions and listen to calls while they were traveling on the Internet. This is why the Egyptian spies had to hack people directly with Finfisher to listen to the Skype calls of their targets.
“Skype calls have excellent sound quality and are highly secure with end -to -end encryption”, ” Skype home page Read in 2004.
Skype encryption was a revolutionary and revolutionary function at the time. In the mid-1990s, legendary cryptographer Phil Zimmermann created a fairly good confidentiality, or PGP, software that allowed people to make files or private e-mails with end -to -end encryptionThis means that only the sender and the receiver can read the content of the message. But PGP was clumsy and was not included in chat and call applications that are easy to use.
Now, more than 20 years later, end -to -end encryption is cooked in applications that are used by billions of people, most of whom may not make their messages and calls are secure with this data grinding technology. Imessage and facetime of Apple, Facebook Messenger, Signal and WhatsApp, among others, are all encrypted from start to finish by default.
But in 2003, Skype was the first to offer this level of encryption and intimacy.
After its launch, Skype sparked the anger of the law enforcement organizations around the world. In Italy, La Polizia Post (Postal and Communications Police), the agency responsible for investigating the crimes on the Internet, asked the small hacking team of cybersecurity advice to build a spyware phone telephone capable of bypassing Skype encryption, among other suffocation features, according to the former employees of the hacking team who spoke.
Around the world, other governments have found different ways to spy on Skype users. In 2008, Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group at the University of Toronto, noted that Skype had been changed to allow Chinese spies To collect messages exchanged through service. In China, Skype was operated by Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and ebay, who owned Skype at the time.
Years later, the secret files disclosed by former American government entrepreneur Edward Snowden revealed that Microsoft, who now owns Skype, had changed the application to allow the National Security Agency and other authorities To collect calls and messageseffectively swinging the appraisal of the application.
This week, Microsoft announced that he would close Skype on May 5. At this stage, Skype is a marginal application. In 2023, Microsoft said that it still had 36 million users, far from its 300 million users.
While Skype is largely a relic of yesteryear and will soon stop operating, Skype’s heritage lives in the technology that secures the communications of all the most popular cat applications in the world. And the world is a safer and freer place, thanks to the revolutionary ideas of Skype developers on privacy.
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