John Pescatore

Lawrence Orans has guest-blogged here a few times giving Gartner’s take on using Skype securely if the business decides that Skype use will be allowed. In Gartner research notes and advice to clients, Lawrence and I have changed the focus from “you must block Skype” to “if you must allow Skype, do this…” The business justification for using Skype is mostly to reduce the cost of telecomms, and mostly to reduce the cost of international calls. Of course, the unwritten justification is often because managers use Skype to chat with their kids in college, but anyway…

This week, Reuters reports that Russia’s largest business lobby has decided that Skype is a threat to national security – or at least to the profits of Russian telecomms firms. While most of the argument is economic, they did trot out the “law enforcement can’t monitor VoIP” argument to tie in with national security fears. Of course, that genie is long out of the bottle – anyone who wants to talk over the Internet to evade surveillance has a wide range of choices.

But that really does raise an issue, back to the lack of security focus in free software: societally, many countries have decided that telecommunications providers do have to provide law enforcement access to communications. Individually, we may agree or disagree – but most countries have decided some loss of individual privacy is called for to deal with criminals and other threats to society. Part of the price of telecommunication services is supporting these societal demands, such as dealing with CALEA or the PATRIOT Act, or more recent demands for support for E911 location services.

This is a complex issue. Local telephone services have surcharges for support to these societal demands, but in that case the telcos getting the revenue are the ones who also bear the cost. Putting a surcharge on ISPs or everyone’s ISP bill doesn’t answer the question of how to get the free VoIP providers to share the pain. But from a business security point of view, businesses will make the decisions based on individual financial motivations. Legislation aimed at protecting national telecomms firms may be coming in the future to add another dimension to that decision.