Skype confirms spying on messages in China

VoIP outfit Skype has admitted that surveillance was carried out on instant messages sent using the service in China, blaming local partner TOM Online for the eavesdropping. The eBay subsidiary said that it only discovered this week that a text-filter used to block conversations containing sensitive keywords had been altered to store and log conversations, AFP reports. Skype publicly acknowledged the filter two years ago. Skype had assured customers that messages containing sensitive words were discarded at the client end, and that full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people’s privacy. The VoIP provider said that the practice had been altered “without our knowledge or consent” and apologised.

The issue came to light after researchers from Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto, were able to establish that TOM-Skype was “censoring and logging” text chat messages containing certain keywords. These included democracy, earthquake and milk powder. Mentions of Falun Gong, political opposition to the ruling Chinese Communist Party, or support for Taiwan as a separate political entity also got the tapes rolling, the New York Times reports. The logged messages were stored on eight insecure publicly-accessible servers, allowing Citizen Lab to read messages and expose the eavesdropping. The researchers discovered a million censored messages, and were able to work out a list of trigger words by sampling them.