NSA to buy away into Skype?
 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02..._skype_pwnage/

If the NSA have to pay Skype (a european company) / ebay to access IM /calls make via Skype shouldn't the national govenments have to pay ISP's to access their customers data / transmissions?

Re: NSA to buy away into Skype?
 

In fairness, what they are talking about is paying billions to any company that can eavesdrop on IM systems. This is probably why our Government has done nothing about Phorm, which would get them a long way toward doing the same thing for free..

Re: NSA to buy away into Skype?
 

Related: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7890443.stm

As for cracking Skype, I don't think its possible unless Skype was bought out and clients updated. Even if Skype decided to stop updating the algorithm regularly and it was broken they still have to unravel the conversations from a mess of P2P traffic that Skype is based on. I suspect the reward is related to the latter rather than the former considering the amount of brute force hardware they have at their disposal.
The really bad guys have probably already moved over to Freenet by now anyway.

Re: NSA to buy away into Skype?
 

I'd guess they are mainly interested in who calls who rather than the actual content of the conversations. I'd concur that it would be an absolute nightmare to isolate the exact content of an individual conversation.