According to reports, there may be a back door built into Skype, which allows connections to be bugged. The company has declined to expressly deny the allegations. At a meeting with representatives of ISPs and the Austrian regulator on lawful interception of IP based services held on 25th June, high-ranking officials at the Austrian interior ministry revealed that it is not a problem for them to listen in on Skype conversations.
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The short version of this article seems to be that the Austrian Interior Ministry claims they can jack in to Skype conversations with relative ease, however no other real backing information seems to have come out yet. Also of course there are mentions of a few ISPs putting in bridges for easier snooping of packets and the like. With this cat out of the bag I wonder how long before some enterprising young hacker or software engineer pulls Skype apart and indeed finds a backdoor or other weakness that could be leveraged by a government for spying purposes? Makes me glad I finally moved over to something a bit more transparent like Mumble.
