Skype Users In China Are Being Monitored For Political Content
News that users of Skype in China are having their communications monitored for political content such as “democracy”, “Taiwan independence” & “Tibet” has recently been reported.
It would seem Skype the ebay owned VOIP Telecoms company has become the latest US company to get mixed up in controversy regarding its operations in China. Their Chinese partner TOM-Skype has been spying on users in China and collecting messages with specific keywords as mentioned above.
This information was released by Citizen Lab, a group of computer security experts at the University of Toronto who ,even more worryingly, found that personal information was being stored against any of these keywords. Such as internet addresses, user names and other information which would make the senders and recipients easy to identify.
It has long been known that China exercises strict control over the internet, blocking sites linked to Chinese dissidents, the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement & the Tibetan Government-in-exile.
Skype president Josh Silverman said in a statement that TOM Online:
“just like any other communications company in China, has established procedures to meet local laws and regulations.
“These regulations include the requirement to monitor and block instant messages containing certain words deemed ‘offensive’ by the Chinese authorities,” Silverman said.
“It is common knowledge that censorship does exist in China and that the Chinese government has been monitoring communications in and out of the country for many years,” he said.
However for a US company to be mixed up this does nothing for its public relations especially in western democratic nations.
He than also went on to say that in April 2006, Skype admitted that TOM Online:
“operated a text filter that blocked certain words in chat messages” and unsuitable messages were to be “discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere.”
“It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed,” he said.
“We are currently addressing the wider issue of the uploading and storage of certain messages with TOM,” Silverman said, stressing that the millions of people around the world using standard Skype software were unaffected.
“Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private,” he said.
The report, “Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform,” was published on Wednesday on the website of Information Warfare Monitor, a joint project between Citizen Lab and the SecDev Group, a think-tank on security issues based in Ottawa.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Just to clarify – the issues highlighted in the Citizen Lab report affect only the TOM-Skype software distributed by TOM in China, and not standard versions of Skype. Skype-to-Skype conversations between user of standard versions of Skype (even in China) remain completely secure and private.