Comment 86 for bug 296867

http://live.gnome.org/Empathy/FAQ#Will_Empathy_have_OTR_.28.22Off_The_Record.22.29_support.3F:
"Will Empathy have OTR ("Off The Record") support?

We think that the correct approach to secure end-to-end communications is to support it natively in the protocol. There is ongoing work on standardising secure end-to-end messaging in Jingle (using XTLS and Jingle) and we plan to support this in the future (current API sketch).

We don't think that layering encrypted messaging on top of protocols that don't support it is very useful, since such extensions won't, by definition, work in native protocol clients, and any clients that do go out of their way to support encrypted messaging might as well do so using a native protocol.

Nevertheless there is a bug report talking about OTR support, and a comment dated October 2009 is talking about API sketches for encrypted channels and OTR. <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=545347#c12> (please do not submit "me too" comment in the bug report, thanks)."