Skype Heavily Monitored by Chinese Government

Skype has been heavily criticized after it was discovered that communications of Skype users in China were being monitored by the Communist Chinese government.

In China, Tom Online is the majority partner in a joint venture that brings Internet communications to Chinese citizens. The software developed and distributed by Tom utilizes Skype functionality, and Tom implements their protocols to meet the rules and regulation of China government authorities.

The idea that the Chinese [government] might be monitoring communications in and out of the country shouldn’t surprise anyone, and in fact, it happens regularly with most forms of communication such as emails, traditional phone calls, and chats between people within China and between people communicating to people in China from other countries.

Nevertheless, we were very concerned to hear about the apparent security issue which made it possible for people to view chat information among mainly Tom users, and we are pleased that, once we informed Tom about it, that they were able to fix the flaw.

Skype updated their initial statement from the above to the one below:

In 2006, Skype publicly disclosed that Tom operated a text filter that blocked certain words on chat messages but that it did not compromise Tom customers’ privacy. Last night, we learned that this practice was changed without our knowledge or consent and we are extremely concerned. We deeply apologize for the breach of privacy on Tom’s servers in China and we are urgently addressing this situation with Tom.

We confirm our strong belief that Skype to Skype communications, enabled by our peer to peer architecture and strong encryption, remain the most secure form of publicly available communications today.

The same listening to Skype communication can be accomplished anywhere. What is needed is an independent software encryption that can be used over Skype for truly secure communication.