Legal Research

KGB and Keystone Kops, All Rolled Into One [UPDATED]

John Markoff reports today about how the Chinese government blocks chat messages sent by TOM-Skype users containing forbidden words, then logs the text of the message, date and time, and the IP address and user name of the sender.  They even log chats between TOM-Skype users in China and Skype members in other countries.  Information about Skype voice calls is also logged, but not the actual conversations themselves.  (Skype claims they are encrypted.)

Nart Villeneuve, a researcher at the Citizen Lab in Toronto, discovered the surveillance.  It’s a great story.  Using packet-sniffing software, he discovered that every time he sent a TOM-Skype message containing the f-bomb, “a connection was made to a URL with encrypted data being uploaded.”  (page 14)  He followed the trail back and discovered a group of eight servers containing encrypted log files.  The servers weren’t secured properly, so Villeneuve could gain access to them, list directories and log files, and — here come the Keystone Kops! — get ahold of the key used to encrypt the logs.  (It gets worse.  The TOM-Skype servers were previously hacked by file-sharers.  On Page 16 of his report, Villeneuve even provides screen captures of his Google searches showing which illegal files were living on the servers.)

Villeneuve downloaded the logs of blocked messages, then decrypted and translated them.  After removing duplicates and those messages containing simply obscenities, he came up with a pool of about 100,000 chats.  On page 15, he provides us with a list of statistically-significant verboten terms he extracted from the messages:

communist
Communist Party
Falun
Hu Jintao
Taiwan independence
Skype
Wen Jiabao
quit the party
Jiang Zemin
June 4
Olympic Games
Nine Commentaries
Li Hongzhi
earthquake
democracy
Tibet
Mao Zedong
Circumvention
Deng Xiaoping
Diaoyu Islands
Kuomintang
Tiananmen
milk powder
SARS
Voice of America

Villeneuve also discovered that many seemingly innocent chats were blocked.  He concluded that the Chinese government may be using other “criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.”  (page 4)  Other messages containing banned words were, indeed, delivered.  Villeneuve feels “it may also indicate that TOM-Skype is performing surveillance: logging messages containing keywords but continuing to display the messages to users.”  (Page 10)

This episode is just part of the huge effort China makes to control Internet traffic.  It’s sometimes referred to as the Great Firewall of China.  Hmmm … where have I read something about control recently?

I think it’s safe to assume that whatever you do on the Web is being monitored, whether by our government or by others.  You can choose not to worry about it, or you can learn how to anonymize and encrypt.  The choice is yours.

Update, 3:30 - Boing Boing tells us that Skype has apologized.

Full post as published by Jenkins Webblits on October 02, 2008 (boomark / email).