Beijing -A Skype joint venture in China monitors and archives certain internet text conversations that include politically charged words, according to a report published by a group of Canadian computer security researchers Thursday. TOM-Skype, a joint venture between TOM Online, a unit of Hong Kong-based TOM Group Ltd, and Skype, a unit of US-based eBay, was found byresearchers at Ottawa-based Citizen Lab to monitor and store millions of records containing personal information of users of the Chinese service, as well as those who participated in voice calls using the service.
Skype is a software that allows users to make telephone calls, send text messages or transfer files over the internet.
If keywords from a list are present in a message the text and records containing personal information are stored on insecure publicly-accessible servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data, according to a joint report by The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and The SecDev Group in Ottawa.
The monitoring-and-storage is alarming to many, particularly dissidents, who believed that Skype uses encryption that protects users from government monitoring.
Jennifer Caukin, a spokeswoman for Skype, told the Wall Street Journal that the idea that China's government "might be monitoring communications in and out of the country shouldn't surprise anyone."
She added that the security problem that enabled people to view user information had been remedied since the report was released.
A statement from the TOM Group in the Wall Street Journal said that "as a Chinese company, we adhere to rules and regulations in China where we operate our businesses."
Nart Villeneuve, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, discovered the surveillance system when he used an analysis tool to monitor data generated by the TOM-Skype software, according to the New York Times.
Villeneuve found that when he typed a particular swear word into the text messaging program an encrypted message was sent to an unidentified internet address and then stored on TOM Online computers.
He discovered he could examine the messages online as they were readable with a simple Web browser. After encrypting the log files he found hundreds of records of messages that had been stored and could learn the user names as well as message content.
The number of TOM-Skype registered users reached 70 million in the first half of 2008.
