On the evening of March 5, 2012, the Egyptian revolutionary took place in Cairo and stormed the headquarters of a secret police called the National Security Investigation (SSI) Service, a building known as the “capital of hell” because of its reputation as a place where ruthless officers tortured prisoners.
Inside, protesters discovered both unharmed and shredded documents, torture devices, hard drives, CDs and DVDs.
In the document, protesters found a memorandum written in Arabic by an SSI officer about a mystical software called Finfisher, created by the German British company Gamma International.
Officials reported that it is a “high-level hacking system” with several features including the ability for Finfisher to access email inboxes, upload “spy files” to target devices, track communications, and “full control” on hacked target devices, and – Crific's “hacking” network “successfully” recorded “successfully” in Crific's “hacking” network. It is encrypted.
In the early 2010s, Skype was the most popular internet phone call app not only in Egypt but also in the world.
Released in 2003, Skype promised unprecedented privacy, and was called “very secure with end-to-end encryption,” and in theory, internet hackers and spies couldn't read chats and listen to calls across the internet. So Egyptian spies had to hack directly onto people's computers using Finfisher to hear target Skype calls.
Screenshot of Skype homepage in 2004 when end-to-end encryption was still not widely available outside messaging apps like Skype.image Credits: TechCrunch (screenshot)
“Skype calls have excellent sound quality and are extremely secure with end-to-end encryption,” read the Skype homepage in 2004.
Skype's encryption was an innovative and groundbreaking feature of its time. In the mid-1990s, legendary cryptographer Phil Zimmerman created pretty good privacy, PGP, software that allows people to make files or emails private with end-to-end encryption. However, PGP was clunky and not included in easy-to-use chat and calling apps.
Now, over 20 years later, end-to-end encryption is burned into apps used by billions of people. Most of them are unaware that this data scrambling technology ensures messages and calls. Apple's Imessage and FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, Signal, and WhatsApp are encrypted end-to-end by default.
However, in 2003, Skype was the first to offer this level of encryption and privacy.
After its launch, Skype sparked rage among law enforcement agencies around the world. In Italy, government agencies (post and communications police) tasked with investigating crimes over the internet have asked a small cybersecurity consulting startup hacking team to build phone spyware that can avoid Skype encryption, among other snooping features.
Around the world, other governments have found different ways to spy on Skype users. In 2008, Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group at the University of Toronto, discovered that Skype had been changed to allow Chinese spies to collect messages exchanged across services. In China, Skype was run by Tom-Skype, a joint venture between eBay and Chinese wireless operators who owned Skype at the time.
A few years later, a secret file leaked by former US government contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Microsoft, who currently owns Skype, can change the app so that the National Security Agency and other authorities can collect calls and messages and effectively defeat the app's proud encryption.
This week, Microsoft announced that it would shut down Skype on May 5th. At this point, Skype is a fringe app. In 2023, Microsoft said there were still 36 million users, far from the peak of 300 million users.
Skype is primarily a relic of last year and will soon be out of service, but Skype's legacy lives on with technology that ensures all communications of the world's most popular chat apps. And thanks to the groundbreaking ideas about privacy of the original Skype developer, the world is a safer and more free place.
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