Text "Skype audio and video chats, widely regarded as resistant to interception thanks to encryption, can be wiretapped by American intelligence agencies, according to a new report in The Guardian. The report appears to contradict claims by Microsoft that it has not provided the contents of Skype communications to the government. In a story published Thursday, based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, The Guardian offers some detail about extensive cooperation between the FBI, the National Security Agency, and Microsoft to enable government access to user communications via the intelligence tool known as PRISM. That cooperation included, according to the leaked NSA documents, enabling access to Outlook.com e-mails and chats, the SkyDrive cloud storage service, and Skype audio and video calls. The Guardian hasn't published the documents on which this story is based but has instead quoted from them. Since Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011, many technologists and security experts have feared that changes to Skype’s architecture, which increased reliance on Microsoft-owned “supernodes” rather than peer-to-peer routing, would enable government wiretapping on a service once widely seen as untappable. Those fears were bolstered in May, when security researchers found evidence that Microsoft has access to the unencrypted contents of Skype chats. Previously, it had been widely thought that such interception was impossible, because Skype communications are encrypted end-to-end, meaning the participants in a conversation generated and stored the keys needed to decrypt it. A report in The Washington Post last year suggested that while Skype had increased cooperation with law enforcement, interception of voice and video chats remained “impractical.” ( via arstechnica.com )" copied.