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As Skype shuts down, its legacy is end-to-end encryption for the masses
iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp have made E2EE the default for messaging, but Skype paved the way decades ago.
In the early evening of March 5, 2012, in Cairo, Egyptian revolutionaries stormed the headquarters of the secret police called the State Security Investigations (SSI) service, a building known as “the capital of hell” because of its reputation as a place where ruthless officers tortured prisoners. In the mid-1990s, legendary cryptographer Phil Zimmermann created Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, software that allowed people to make files or emails private with end-to-end encryption, meaning only the sender and receiver could read the content of the message. In 2008, Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group at the University of Toronto, found that Skype had been modified to allow Chinese spies to collect messages exchanged across the service.
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