By force of technology innovation, the controversial governmental practice of eavesdropping could become a thing of the past. Skype, eBay's Internet calling service, provides encrypted free voice
calls and instant messaging between users. "Encrypted" means lots of complicated mathematical operations make it nearly impossible to snoop, though Skype says that's debatable. If that's true,
criminals, terrorists and psychos are just as anonymous using Skype as those who want to call their family. Skype calls move through the Web encrypted with "keys," which are very long numbers--256
bits long to be exact, which is double the length of those used by credit card companies. In theory, that means Skype's 256-bit keys would take trillions of times longer to crack than credit card
companies' 128-bit keys, which are already considered practically impossible to break. But Skype may not be quite so secure as it seems, according to security experts, because the company has yet to
open its technology to review. Even so, a weak encryption system is still extremely difficult to break, and, "would {likely} stymie the kind of broad eavesdropping that the National Security Agency is
reputed to be performing," said the Associated Press.
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