Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China

Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China

www.nytimes.com

A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

(visit the link for the full news article)


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Mod Edit: Fixed title to reflect source.
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[edit on 1/10/2008 by Badge01]

...also from the article:

The Citizen Lab researchers issued a report on Wednesday, which details an analysis of data on the servers. “We were able to download millions of messages that identify users,” said Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. “This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true. It’s ‘X-Files’ without the aliens.”

www.nytimes.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Given that China rules with an iron fist this hardly comes as a surprise. Just look at the level of censorship imposed during the Olympics. China doesn't want its citizens talking to outsiders unless it meets their objectives and conforms to their liking.

brill

reply to post by arktkchr



I wouldn’t be surprised if this was going on in most countries. Including the US of A.

reply to post by rapinbatsisaltherage


Yeah. I was thinking this was bad because it gave our government another idea.

Considering we currently think the Internet is a series of tubes, I don't believe we would have thought of this one.

Actually it IS going on in the USA. An AT&T employee with high security clearance was curious about the NSA sending a computer tech to work in a new room build atop an AT&T building. Being a somewhat high-up the totem-pole employee he decided to check it out. what he found was that they had installed "splitters." The NSA was literally making copies of all traffic going through that building. A huge amount of info. He took pictures of some documents detailing all of this.

I think it was on youtube a couple years ago.

I wondered why the Chinese Railroad Ministry is trying to connect to my computer. Peer Guardian blocks them all the time, along with many other foreign government agencies.

I wonder if this is the Chinese version of web bot. We know that they are working on their own prediction program.