After posting the entry about Surveillance of Skype Messages in China, I was immediately informed that the issues highlighted in the Citizen Lab report affect only the TOM-Skype software distributed by TOM in China and that standard versions of Skype remain unaffected. [thanks Peter]. This is indeed an important piece of information as to appease the fears of the Skype user base.

It looks like Skype has been active in addressing the public in regards to this matter. Here are some excerpts from their President Josh Silverman.

The New York Times reported that a group of Canadian human right activist and a computer security researcher has discovered a surveillance system that monitors and archives web text messages and conversations. It is triggered when the conversation includes politically charged words. Researchers in Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto uncovered hundreds of message records after they decrypted the messages. Example words are “communist”, “quit the party”, “democracy”, “Tibet”, “Tiananmen” “SARS”, “Taiwan Independence”, and “milk powder”.

Media Monitoring Controvery
This new discovery again highlights the controversy of media monitoring by the Chinese government. The Chinese government filters out websites, images, stories from the web and makes them inaccessible through search engines. The most notorious was the removal of Tiananmen Square related information. The most recent controversy involved the accusation of the Chinese Gymnastic team being underaged. Hundreds of blog posts with screenshots of records of the Chinese Gymnastic team that was found through Internet research appeared on the web, but soon after each of the online records would mysteriously disappear. The investigation was recently dropped due to the lack of evidence.