On the night of March 5, 2012, in Cairo, Egyptian revolutionaries introduced the seat The secret police called the State Security Research Service (SSI), a building known as the “capital of hell” because of its reputation as a place where ruthless officers were tortured prisoners.
Inside, protesters found both intact and shredded documents, torture devices, hard drives, CDs and DVDs – all documented nightmarish torture and extensive surveillance.
Among the documents, demonstrators I found a memorandum It was written in Arabic by SSI officers for a mysterious software called the Finfisher, made by the British-German company Gamma International.
Officers reported that Finfisher was a “high-level hacking system” with various features, including the ability to access inbox and upload “Spy Files” on the target device, monitoring their communication, which acquire “complete control” over the Hacked Goals and-Curriculum. “Incype Incyp
At the beginning of 2010, Skype was the most popular online phone application in the world and not just Egypt.
Started in 2003, Skype promised its users The unprecedented protection of privacy, with calls “extremely secure with end to end”, which-theoretically-made it impossible for hackers or internet spies to read the conversations and listen to calls while traveling online. That is why Egyptian spies need directly to people’s computers with Finfisher to hear the skype calls of their goals.
“Skype calls have excellent sound quality and are extremely safe with end to end” Skype’s homepage Read in 2004.
Skype’s encryption was a revolutionary and pioneering feature at that time. In the mid -1990s, legendary cryptographer Phil Zimmermann created good privacy or PGP, software that allowed people to make e -mails privately by end to end encryption, which means that only the sender and receiver could read the content. But the PGP was clunky and was not included in the easy to use conversation and applications.
Now, more than 20 years later, end -to -end encryption is baked in applications used by billions of people, most of whom may not realize their messages and their calls are insured with this technology that is distinguished by data. Apple’s IMessage and Facetime, Facebook Messenger, Signal and WhatsApp, among other things, are all encrypted from end to end of default.
But in 2003, Skype was the first to offer this level of encryption and privacy.
After began, Skype sparked anger between law enforcement services worldwide. In Italy, Polizia Postale (Post Post and Communications Police), the organization that had been investigating the internet crimes, asked the small starting group of Cybersecurity Consulting Hacking to build the Spyware phone capable of getting Skype encryption, including other Snooping features, Hacking group with whom I talked.
Around the world, other governments have found different ways to spy on Skype users. In 2008, Citizen Lab, a digital rights survey team at the University of Toronto, found that Skype had been modified to allow Chinese spies to collect messages exchanged throughout the service. In China, Skype operated by Tom-Skype, a consortium between a Chinese wireless operator and Ebay, who held Skype at that time.
Years later, the secret records leaked by former US government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Microsoft, who now owns Skype, had modified the application to allow the National Security Organization and other authorities To collect calls and messagesessentially defeating the encryption of the application.
This week, Microsoft announced that it will close Skype on May 5. At this point, Skype is a fringe application. In 2023, Microsoft said it still had 36 million users, away from the top of 300 million users.
While Skype is largely a relic of the past and will soon stop working, Skype’s legacy lives in technology that ensures the communications of all the most popular conversation applications in the world. And the world is a safer, free space, thanks to the original ideas of Skype developers for privacy.
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