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Falun Gong
Taiwan Independence
Chinese Communist Party
Democracy
Earthquake
All those words above could get you in trouble if you live in China, according to Canadian human-rights activist. The New York Times has just reported that the activist have found a surveillance system which monitors and archives certain conversations of customers of communications software Tom-Skype.
The system, they say, identify and archive “politically-charged” conversations based on certain keywords, which of late includes “Milk”.
This is of course worrying, and not good for the future of the Internet. Sure, we can all talk about how everyone already know about China’s reputation for infringement of human rights and invasion of privacy. But who’s tho say that this can’t, or isn’t done in any other countries – especially, as the article states, corporations have worked with authorities previously by providing information on users.
Scary stuff.
9.15am Malaysian time (+8 GMT)
Tags: china, SKype, Surveillance, Tom-Skype
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I’m in China now. =/
It’s important to remember that the issues described in the report affect only the TOM-Skype software distributed in China. Communications where all parties are using standard Skype software. Skype-to-Skype communications are, and always have been, completely secure and private.
Josh Silverman, Skype’s President, has blogged about the situation and what we’re doing to resolve it.
Thanks Peter for the clarification – as has Josh Silverman in the link you provided.
I think that a lot of users, like me, are not going to quit communicating on the Internet – whether is through Skype or other software.
What is important to note however is that “protocol” has been breached – as mentioned in Mr Silverman’s blog post – and that essentially was the essence of my post.
The Internet is scary because it allows – whether it is executed or not – for such monitoring and archiving to be done. And people need to realise that the Internet as a whole should be seen as a public sphere where even the “private” is not so, well, private.
This is not an alarmist call, but perhaps one in reaction to calls for a paradigm shift on how people choose to negotiate the Internet for their own use.