A group of Canadian researchers of internet censorship in The Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto in Canada, have exposed Internet surveillance by Skype in alliance with its Chinese partner, Tom Online, Inc.

In the report Breaching Trust, published on Oct 01, 2008, Citizen Lab researchers said " Many of the politically sensitive messages logged by TOM-Skype make reference to the The Epoch Times and Falun Gong linked campaign that encourages Chinese citizens to quit the Chinese Com-munist Party (CCP). "

Here's some more quotations about the surveillance on the "Quit the CCP" movement:

In 2005 the "Global Service Center for Quitting the CCP" was set up to encourage Chinese citizens to quit the CCP. This campaign uses "[t]elephone, mobile phone text messages, chat-ting online" to contact Chinese citizens and provide them with information that is critical of the CCP and highlights the persecution of the Falun Gong.

This campaign has made extensive use of Skype including Skype "public chats" and SkypeCast.

While the campaign uses Skype extensively, they also warn users of the filtering capabilities of the Chinese version distributed by TOM-Skype. However, many users contacted by members of the cam-paign are using TOM-Skype, resulting in numerous logged text chat messages on TOM-Skype servers in China.

 

In fact, they are quite open about exactly who they are and what they are doing. Thus it is
trivial to identify users associated with the campaign.

我是全球退党服务中心的义工
(I am a global service centre for volunteers to quit the party [machine translation])

Without further testing we are unable to conclusively determine that the objective is surveillance rather than filtering. However, we do know that regardless of the process the full messages are being logged and could be used for surveillance. Moreover, many of these messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting that there may be criteria, such as usernames or who one has chatted with, or particular public chats, that determine how fine-grain the logging should be.

For example, messages were logged that consisted entirely of "123", "谢谢" (Thank You [machine
translation]), and just a text smiley face ":)." The fact that messages such as these are being logged suggests that at least some of the logging is focused on criteria other than just general keywords.

To read the full report from Citizen Lab, please click here: Breaching Trust