Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance | Ars Technica

Encrypted or not, Skype communications prove “vital” to NSA surveillance | Ars Technica: Last year, Ars documented how Skype encryption posed little challenge to Microsoft abuse filters that scanned instant messages for potentially abusive Web links. Within hours of newly created, never-before-visited URLs being transmitted over the service, the scanners were able to pluck them out of a cryptographically protected stream and test if they were malicious. Now comes word that the National Security Agency is also able to work around Skype crypto—so much so that analysts have deemed the Microsoft-owned service "vital" to a key surveillance regimen known as PRISM.

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