broadband news

China 'uses broadband to spy on its citizens'

China has been monitoring and recording messages sent via the hugely popular VoIP broadband service Skype, researchers have claimed.

This means up to 30million VoIP broadband users in the country could have had their messages read and logged by Chinese officials, in what is seen as a major breech of privacy and freedom of speech.

Researchers from the University of Toronto uncovered a huge database of 150,000 stored messages containing words deemed 'offensive' to the Chinese government. These included 'democracy', 'Tibet' and conversations relating to Falun Gong, a spiritual movement which is outlawed in China.

When informed of the broadband privacy breech, Skype remained defensive of their cooperation with China, saying that the state's monitoring of its broadband users was "common knowledge."

The broadband chat program is offered in China through a joint venture between the eBay-owned Skype and Hong Kong-based telecoms firm Tom Group. It operates under the name Tom-Skype.

The VoIP broadband surveillance system was discovered when one of the university's researchers started to experiment with the Skype program. He found that every time he typed a particular swear word into the text chat service, a message was sent to an unknown location. Further digging revealed this to be the Tom-Skype server, where messages were being stockpiled.

The discovery will come as no surprise to broadband users in China who are used to having their broadband use restricted. During the recent Olympic Games, the state was criticised for preventing broadband access to Western websites.

05/10/2008
Author: CompareBroadbandUK staff writer

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