Big Brother Is Listening in China, and Its Name Is Skype

We keep coming back to China on our search for outrageous breaches of press and speech freedoms.

Now we hear from Canada's Citizen Lab that they have discovered a "huge surveillance system" that can capture your every word in conversations or messages about what the Chinese bosses may consider "suspicious subjects."

As we have learned before, what the Beijing regime may consider "suspicious" can be filed as an entire encyclopedia. It's no wonder then that the spying system — a joint venture between a Chinese company and the US owner of Skype, eBay — was able to censor one million text messages, according to Citizen Lab.

Their full report, entitled "Breaching Trust," can be downloaded here, and its major findings include the following:

—The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.
—These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.
—The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party of China.
—Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting  that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.

The New York Times published an article about the report, which mentions the list of restricted words the spying system was after. Does the word "milk" ring the bell?

The list includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence and the Chinese Communist Party, according to the researchers. It includes not only words like democracy, but also earthquake and milk powder. (Chinese officials are facing criticism over the handling of earthquake relief and chemicals tainting milk powder.)

You certainly rip what you saw.