Who would ever guess that China is blocking "sensitive" words as dangerous as "Tibet" and "milk powder" in Skype text messages? Next thing you know someone is going to tell us that the US is also snooping on those calls.
On Wednesday, Nart Villeneuve at the University of Toronto revealed that a Chinese version of Skype's application is being used for wholesale surveillance of text messages.
The software is distributed by Skype's Chinese partner, Tom Online Inc. Skype has acknowledged since 2006 that this version looks for certain sensitive words in text chats, and blocks those messages from reaching their destination.
What Villeneuve found was that the Tom-Skype program also passes the messages caught by the filter to a cluster of servers on Tom's network. Because of poor security on those servers, he was able to retrieve more than a million stored messages. The filter appears to look for words like "Tibet," "democracy" and "milk powder" — China is in the throes of a food scandal involving tainted milk.
This directly contradicts a blog posting on Skype's Web site, which says that the software discards the filtered messages, and neither displays nor transmits them anywhere.
A Skype spokeswoman was not available for comment Thursday. Skype has earlier given contradictory statements on the eavesdropping issue.
It has told The Associated Press that it "cooperates fully with all lawful requests from relevant authorities." But when asked by CNET's News.com in June whether it could accommodate a wiretapping request, it said it could not, because of the way its system works: Skype calls are encrypted, and only the two computers at each end have the keys to decrypt them.
Yet both Schneier and Simson Garfinkel, an associate of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University who has studied Skype's security, believe it would actually be trivial for the company to listen in on conversations.
