Skype Messages Monitored In China 223
Pickens writes "Human-rights activists have discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives Internet text conversations sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay. Researchers say the system monitors a list of politically charged words that includes words related to the religious group Falun Gong, Taiwan independence, the Chinese Communist Party and also words like democracy, earthquake and milk powder. The encrypted list of words inside the Tom-Skype software blocks the transmission of these words and records personal information about the customers who send the messages. Researchers say their discovery contradicts a public statement made by Skype executives in 2006 that 'full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people's privacy.' The Chinese government is not alone in its Internet surveillance efforts. In 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was monitoring large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of an eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. 'This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true,' says Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto. 'It's "X-Files" without the aliens.'"
In end-to-end security... (Score:5, Insightful)
...the last thing to trust is closed source implementation or even worse, proprietary protocol.
though I think real paranoid people won't trust something like Skype, right?
Open source (Score:5, Insightful)
This is also an argument in favor of using open source software. I've been dubious in the past about claims that closes-source vendors couldn't be trusted, but apparently I was being naive.
Sounds like the FSF [fsf.org] got this one right.
Not the same (Score:2, Insightful)
The NSA program was designed to listen in on US citizens talking to people on a known terrorist list. One part of the conversation was always international and one part was domestic. Telephone conversations are two ways and you kind of need to here both side to know what is going on. Now was this illegal? Maybe. Should it have happened? That's up in the air. The program was supposedly done to protect the US Citizens from another terrorist attack.
Compare and contrast this with the Chinese Program. This program exists to control the thoughts of the Chinese people. It censors them and prevents the flow of information. Then it reports on them simply because they are talking about things which in the United States are completely legal to talk about but in China are completely illegal to talk about. China has no freedom of speech. Their every move is watched to control them online. They aren't trying to track terrorists here. They are trying to play mind control. They are trying to censor the publics thoughts.
Not the worst nightmare at all (Score:5, Insightful)
'This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true,'
No. The worst nightmare would be when this comes true and no one cares.
Re:Shocked, I am (Score:1, Insightful)
>>>China's system monitors a list of politically charged words
I'm confused. What's the problem? This doesn't sound any different from how the United States operate. After all, we gotta stop those terrorists! (Or anybody else who happens to disagree with the currently-sitting president.) /end sarcasm
Re:Not the same (Score:5, Insightful)
That's only if you trust the government's claims. They have a pretty bad track record. Just do some research on COINTELPRO or Mockingbird. Or realize that the FBI was openly recruiting people to spy on protest groups in Minnesota before the RNC.
Also remember that the patriot act has been used 1000's of times against people who have done nothing terror related. Elliot Spitzer was caught because of the patriot act. It has mostly been used to get drug dealers and shut down strip joints.
Submitter is a troll (Score:0, Insightful)
So, we have an interesting report about China,.
Then, for no intelligent reason, a trroll about a US story that has been hashed, rehashed, and corned beef hashed to death, in an obvious attempt to draw some kind of moronic equivalence.
Submitter is a troll.
Re:Not the worst nightmare at all (Score:3, Insightful)
For the most part, John Q. Public is happy to hand over their rights, and they _don't_ care - and I am scared.
Re:Submitter is a troll (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the poster's point is that Skype is enabling this behavior, and Skype, in case you haven't noticed, has a presence all over the world.
And no one cares (Score:1, Insightful)
Or they selectively care based on whether "their" party is in power or not.
Re:Shocked, I am (Score:2, Insightful)
Why is that reply considered flamebait? Isn't that how it is, really? Recent debates in Sweden is at least about new signal analysis laws for all internationall computer traffic passing our borders. Much worse than just internet telephony alone, even.
How do you know? (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you know that? That's what they say, but how do you know that?
Was the program under some kind of oversight outside of the executive branch? No. Are the details of the program publicly available? No.
You don't actually know how the NSA program compares to the Chinese one. You just hope that's the way it is.
Re:Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In end-to-end security... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not about real paranoid people. The real paranoid people (like me) never trusted skype (encrypted, closed source binary blob).
This news is for the non-tinfoil-hat people. Now they too know, like us paranoid people, that their conversations are tracked, recorded, monitored and archived. For real. And now they know, if they read and understand the news, that what skype sad to us all ('full end-to-end security is preserved and there is no compromise of people's privacy.') was a lie. Skype (eBay) lied, maybe one time, maybe on other, more important things too, and maybe they will do it again.
Re:Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you sure you are not on the terrorist list? List time I checked the US had a do-not-fly list of 1 million names and the list continues to grow...
Re:Shocked, I am (Score:2, Insightful)
I honestly don't understand why people think the Falun Gong is great. They're honestly crazy, and while I don't think the Chinese government should stop them from practicing, I really think they should just let them be so people can see how crazy they really are. Most westerners are so enchanted with eastern cultures that have a cultish streak to it. Heck, most of the time they don't even know what it's it about. Ask an American to point out Tibet on a blank map.
What sucks about the Tibetan situation is that there's no true way to get the truth about the situation. Western media is enchanted with the idea of Tibet rather than the reality. Tibetans make up 40% of the population in Lhasa. We take the Dalai Lhama's word as gospel, even though he definitely has his own incentive to distort the truth. And we obviously can't get the straight talk from the Chinese government.
Sadly, it looks very hypocritical to the world when Americans condemn something like the Chinese control of Tibet, while our own country is occupying Iraq and committing our own human rights violations there. And we at least have the power to vote the bastards out of office!
My parents fled to Taiwan, Republic of China, at the end of the civil war. At first I believed the communists were evil, but it's become clear to me that for the first time in Chinese history that every person in China has a bowl of rice to eat. Whether you like them or not, you can't deny that they destroyed a two-thousand year class system.
Re:Shocked, I am (Score:5, Insightful)
The US taps phone calls in an attempt to uncover evidence of violent crimes, to prevent them from happening, and to prosecute and jail those responsible.
China taps phone calls so they can find out who is speaking out against the one-party government, or bringing up other embarrassing subjects, so that they can send police to drag them out of their house, and put them in front of a firing squad.
Clearly, the two are not at all different.
Re:Shocked, I am (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't bother.
The First rule of Slashdot (and US liberalism in general) is that it's ALWAYS the fault of the US.
The Second rule is that if it isn't the fault of the US, what he US does is equally bad or worse.
The Third rule is that, if a situation arises that doesn't fall neatly into the rules above, see the rules above.
Re:Submitter is a troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Damn foreigners.
Re:Shocked, I am (Score:5, Insightful)
Other than your assertion, got anything to back that up? Certainly, other than China saying it, I see no evidence whatsoever of them having any aspects of being a cult.
I've known several people who were practitioners, and they were some of the nicest, kindest, straight up people I've known. I've skimmed their literature, and I don't see anything in it that I would classify as crazy.
But, the vast majority of what he says about the situation in Tibet is documented, historical fact. And, we listen to what he says because if you read the huge volume of Buddhist writings he's done, he's a very smart guy with a very broad and inclusive world view.
It's awfully hard to come to the conclusion that he's any of the things that China paints him as in light of the rest of the way he has lived his life. Even though it might appear that he has an incentive to distort the truth, the whole package makes it a little implausible that he's secretly evil and sneaky.
Cheers
Re:Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
Where to start.
None of what you say about US phone call monitoring applies, since Skype is not a phone call, it's an internet transmission. The law on collecting packets is a lot weaker than the law on collecting analog signals.
The point of this is that the "crypto" in Skype can be broken and has been broken per a government request. What this means is that virtually any Skype conversation since 2001 should be assumed to be available for review by the Feds. September 11 2001, the Feds installed packet sniffers at consumer ISPs across the country, and told the NOC staffs "this will only be for a few weeks, while we get the Tier 1 taps in place."
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/09/46747?currentPage=all [wired.com]
On to your trusting lunacy about phones: We don't know what the NSA program does and does not do, nor what it is or is not designed to do, nor what it is doing nor how the data can be reexamined in the future. We know a very small amount about what it could do circa 2004 from good reporting, but no one's ever testified about it in a courtroom.
What we do know is that speaking about it in the past tense is amusing.
The scenario you outline - only targeted calls are intercepted - is the current legal justification for continuing to permit it and for retroatively legalizing it.
Once you have the ability to start snarfing those calls, without a warrant and without asking the carrier for further assistance, you will start snarfing a whole lot more. If you accidentally leave your equipment on, you'll just have collected a lot more. Since there is no oversight, there's no reason to be concerned about being reprimanded.
Re:Not the same (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW in theory the chinese citizens have votes too and can even stand for elections (in theory :) ).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China [wikipedia.org]
http://www.china.org.cn/english/Political/26325.htm [china.org.cn]
They only have one party though.
They do have some form of accountability though. In the past few food scandals, the previous food safety chief was executed for corruption, and the current one has resigned.
It's not like they got USD20 million bucks for screwing up.
They most certainly don't execute people for corruption in my country.
As for censorship, the best form of mind control is to give citizens something else to think about.
I think most chinese citizens spend a fair bit of time thinking about getting rich (or at least richer).
I doubt the infamous MMORPG gold farmers would really care about Tibet, Tiananmen, Falun Gong etc, even if they knew about them.
As long as the money and food is satisfactory most people won't care.
Do the US citizens really care either? Bush was reelected, and his party still has a good chance.
The Two Parties have a far better chance than the other parties (which got less than 1% of the total votes in the prev elections).