Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China - NYTimes.com
Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China - NYTimes.com
Activists at Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto, have discovered a massive program of surveillance against Skype in China. Specifically the Chinese are monitoring instant message traffic on Tom-Skype, a joint venture between eBay (the owner of Skype) and a Chinese wireless operator.
It looks like all of the text messages passing through the service are scanned for key words of interest to the Chinese government. This program captures both messages within the Tom-Skype network and between that network and the rest of the Skype network.
This is yet another compelling argument for using strong encryption to prevent interception of message content. People in China can avoid this surveillance by using the non-chinese version of Skype, and using a VPN to get the communications safely out past the Chinese scanners.
- Lance Cottrell
October 14th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
Skype uses inner encryption, and you will never know how it goes to the Internet. Noone can prevent Skype from going to the web - admins cannot close ports and call it a day.