The New York Times reports that Surveillance of Skype Messages Found in China.
Are you surprised that a) the Chinese govt. is spying on and filtering Skype traffic to China, and b) that the Chinese government’s surveillance servers were mis-configured such that Canadian human-rights activists were able to download and analyze copies of the data in question?
This quote in particular is precious:
“I can see an arms race going on,” said Pat Peterson, vice president for technology at Cisco’s Ironport group, which provides messaging security systems. “China is one of the more wired places of the world and they are fighting a war with their populace.”
This quote is amusing because it is Cisco itself (albeit not the Ironport group which was an acquisition) that sold the equipment to the Chinese government to enable the government to implement their “Golden Shield Project or the Great Firewall of China.”
Ebay’s response is grossly inadequate considering the ramifications of this news.
It’s important to remember that the issues highlighted in the report apply only to the TOM-Skype software distributed in China. Standard versions of Skype are unaffected, even when used in China – all communications made with standard versions of Skype remain completely secure and private.
It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords, and we are now inquiring with TOM to find out why the protocol changed.
Josh Silverman, Skype’s president, has posted a statement on the Skype blog explaining where we stand currently, and what we’re doing to sort things out.