August 17th, 2007
Internuts: Skype outage caused by wiretapping retrofit for CIA
Fellow VoIP blogger Tom Keating writes that he’s been receiving email from “tin-foil hatters” (i.e. wackos) that the Skype sign-in outage is being caused by fallout from a project intended to make all Skype calls interceptible by the CIA and FBI.
Tom writes:
Tin foil hatters are emailing me to tell me the CIA and FBI are working closely with Skype to add wiretapping capabilities to the Skype network for tracking terrorist conversations and to make Skype CALEA compliant. They claim that it was the FBI and CIA that brought down the Skype network with their specialized servers that sit on the Skype network and track/record VoIP conversations. But that’s just conspiracy talk.
Tom has little tolerance for “conspiracy talk.” I don’t either. That doesn’t obviate the fact that such undocumented drivel prospers on the Internet.
Good buddy Tom then really socks it to the Internuts:
Next you tin foil hatters are going to tell me Area 51 is holding an alien spaceship or that Elvis is still alive. And don’t get me started on the 9/11 truthers (conspiracy nuts) that think President Bush and our own U.S. government attacked the World Trade Center and imploded the buildings. Yeah, Bush is a master genius to pull off the greatest inside job in history yet stupid enough enough to not at least plant some WMDs in Iraq to get his critics off his back. Yeah, makes perfect sense to me.
Most often, I’ve found that logic and facts defeats the implausability of illogical assumptions. Tom offers a more salient cause for the Skype disruption than work being done for the CIA or FBI:
Skype did perform some maintenance on August 15th, which in all likelihood caused the cascade failure. My next question is why was this planned maintenance so important and why couldn’t it be rolled back?
Yes, upgrades with unintended cosequences. If there is a villain here, it isn’t “the government,” spy agencies, or even President Bush.
It’s a failure on Skype’s part to rehearse worst-case - or even mild-case scenarios that could occur during such planned maintenance, and rapid strategies for fixing the problems that could result.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
