Among China’s community of dissidents and activists, there’s a commonly held belief that, while e-mail and regular phone conversations may be subject to surveillance, Skype is safe from such interference.
Not so, according to a new report, which has uncovered a far-reaching web of surveillance of text messages sent through Tom-Skype, a Chinese joint venture between Ebay, which owns Skype, and Tom Online, the Chinese Internet subsidiary of Tom Group, a Hong Kong-based company controlled by billionaire Li Ka-Shing...
The full report is available here. Key findings are summarized...
–Full text chat messages of Tom-Skype users are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords. If the keywords are found, the messages are uploaded and stored on Tom-Skype’s servers in China.
–The text messages and other records containing personal information are stored on publicly accessible Web servers along with the encryption key that allows the data to be decrypted.
–Keyword scanning looks for terms relating to sensitive topics such as Taiwanese independence, banned religious sect Falun Gong, and opposition to the Communist Party.
–The surveillance may not be solely keyword-driven, as a number of stored messages contained only common words. The report suggests that “that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.”
–The report focuses on text messages, but it says that information on voice calls is also being stored. Logs dating from August 2007 contain records of the IP addresses and usernames of all participants in voice calls (including the username and/or phone number of the recipient). (more)
