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.
