Big Brother Redux: China Monitoring Skype

The Bush Administration’s domestic wiretapping project has nothing on this. Perhaps it’s not a newsflash that China has a vast lattice of Internet police to monitor online activity like blogs and Web posts for dissention, but it’s now been uncovered that the government is also keeping tabs on communications carried on Tom-Skype, which is a joint venture between China’s Tom online ISP and eBay’s VoIP division.

According to a group of Canadian human rights researchers known as the Citizen Lab, China is collecting and storing personal information with the use of text filters and eavesdropping mechanisms that look for politically sensitive keywords (like “underage gymnast?”). Moreover, that personal information is being stored insecurely on publicly accessible servers, Citizen Lab has uncovered. While China doesn’t exactly have a reputation for openness, hasn’t security always been one of their strong suits?

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