Scott Granneman’s new column on SecurityFocus showed up on their security-basics mailing list earlier today. In it, he writes about his worries following eBay’s aquisition of Skype earlier this month.

The main points he makes are that for one, Skype claims to be protected by “strong encryption” but as it’s a closed-source product that uses a proprietary protocol, that can’t be independently verified. Secondly, history has shown eBay to be ridiculously glib with law enforcement agencies - not requiring a subpoena or court order in order to hand over most of a user’s information. In fact, a simple fax on “official letterhead” is all they require. When a company with attitudes like this is put in charge of the private communications of millions of people, this can only be bad news.