This was the first thing I thought of when reading the article: it's a heck of a lot easier to tap off an (encrypted) stream running through a datacenter than it being remote on a supernode.
Of course not; thats not "lawful interception" in the countries that Skype would market such services to. They don't have access to that large-scale data anyway, hence my comment on getting access to it by routing it through your own infrastructure.
Right, which is the "intercept problem" I was talking about. Your concept of "lawful interception" is pretty dated when we're talking about national security agencies rather than police.
The NSA is splitting signals and trawling everything for what they want, it's how it's done now. The recent wired article about the new datacentre was pretty interesting. Which was, as far as i know, not possible with the p2p architecture that skype had previously.
(Was that still a problem? My info is probably out of date, but skype being p2p was a pain in the ass for spying on customers a short while ago)