Chinese Skype spies archive a million conversations

Davey Winder
Thursday, 02 October 2008 16:31

Your IT - Home IT

One of the brand messages to be found on the Skype website is 'Set your conversations free' which is kind of ironic when you consider how a Chinese version of the Skype service monitors and archives messages that trigger politically sensitive keywords...

It really should come as no real surprise that the 'Internet Police' in China keep tabs on Skype messages as well as pretty much every other kind of Internet based communication. The country does not have the best online reputation when it comes to matters of Internet security after all.

The extent to which the Chinese government will monitor and filter the Internet was made pretty clear before and during the Beijing Olympic Games after all.

Indeed, conversation content filtering of Skype is not in itself a new discovery as far as China is concerned either. Back in 2006 Skype were quick to counter charges of the same by insisting conversations were both protected and private.

"The text filter operates on the chat message content before it is encrypted for transmission, or after it has been decrypted on the receiver side. If the message is found unsuitable for displaying, it is simply discarded and not displayed or transmitted anywhere" a Skype statement read.

This was referring to the joint venture that Skype has in mainland China, a co-branded version of Skype that runs with a Chinese wireless operator, and is known as TOM-Skype. 

"In every country we operate in, we always work with local authorities to follow local laws and best practice" a Skype spokesperson said at the time.

Now the full extent of that cooperation is being questioned following the discovery of what the New York Times calls a "huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words."

Canadian human-rights activists working at the Citizen Lab, University of Toronto uncovered the surveillance operation which they say involves a cluster of message logging computers. These 8 China-based computers contained, the researchers say, over one million censored TOM-Skype text messages.

What words trigger the logging, are users identifiable, how secure is this data, are international Skype messages archived? More on page 2...

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