The "P" Word? You Know, Privacy & Psecurity.

From the New York Times and Slashdot : SAN FRANCISCO — A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

While Skype’s encryption has yet to be audited by 3rd parties, at this point it almost doesn’t matter if it ever is. There’s huge window of opportunity to eavesdrop on text chats and conversations before the content is ever encrypted (on the sender’s computer) or after it’s been decrypted on the receiver’s computer.

This is yet another example of the oxymoron “business ethics” – some businesses will do anything to make a buck or to stay in their client’s good graces.

What to do, and who to trust? Try going with an open source IM client using “Off the Record” encryption. Encrypting voice is a bit more involved, but not impossible (just in beta).

Although this isn’t the first time Skype has been taken to task for this type of behavior, hats off to CitizenLab for bringing this back into the spotlight!