[liberationtech] Skype interception - Project Chess

[Nathan of Guardian]

On 06/20/2013 10:08 AM, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
> To the Skype promoters, apologists and deniers - I encourage you to
> start using, and improving Jitsi - it needs a lot of love but it at
> least has a chance of being secure, whereas Skype is beyond repair.

I also want to add to this, that in order to use Jitsi, you need a
trustworthy, privacy-oriented SIP service provider [0], to go with it.
This means someone that doesn't keep logs, doesn't require real name
registration, defaults to secure, and that also offers features to help
defend against traffic analysis and mass metadata gathering [1].

This is exactly what we have been working on at Guardian Project with
our Open Secure Telephony Network [2] project and our public
beta/testbed service at OStel.co. The base service platform we are using
is Kamailio [3], which is a project that should be as equally supported
as Jitsi.

Ultimately, our goal is not to replace one single service with another
single service, but rather to enable every user, organization, NGO,
collective, cooperative, etc to run their own service, or at least have
a variety of hosted service operators that run at a known quality and
standard for privacy-oriented voice and video communications.

+n

[0] OSTel privacy policy https://ostel.co/privacy

[1] more technical discussion here about our approach compared to a
typical voice operator:
https://guardianproject.info/2013/06/12/carrier-grade-verizon-and-the-nsa/

[2] OSTN/OStel source https://github.com/guardianproject/OSTel

[3] Kamailio - Open Source SIP Server - http://www.kamailio.org/