Skype and China: Who Would have Thought It?

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The ever excellent Rebecca McKinnon has a comprehensive blog post on Skype’s problems over the news that the Chinese government has been monitoring some of the free call service’s text messages in China. As I say, it’s pretty comprehensive and addresses the whole issue of large foreign companies and their problems resolving the contradiction between the irresistible attraction the Chinese market presents and the need to comply with Beijing’s unbending desire to monitor its citizens activities on the internet. Money graf:

Skype is now learning the lesson Yahoo! already learned the hard way: that if you leave your users’ privacy and security to your local partner to sort out without paying too much attention to details or thinking through how things might play out, you could burn your users badly and badly damage the credibility of your global brand

As McKinnon notes, Skype’s initial response may seem a little flippant. They said that it should be no surprise to anyone that the Chinese government is monitoring communications in China. That’s true but it doesn’t excuse them from anything.

As a matter of fact, a number of dissidents we talk to (or talked to, as in some cases as they are now in jail), regularly used Skype’s internet telephone service in the belief that this was a way around the undoubted bugs on the landlines and mobiles. I suppose it seems logical that it would be much harder to monitor calls over the internet, but personally I always assumed that the government had some method of bugging Skype too. Having spent a good deal of time reporting on the pursuit and apprehension of Islamic fundamentalists in South East Asia, when about three quarters of arrests were made from phone taps or information gained from phones, it’s pretty clear the authorities seem to be able to stay one jump ahead on these sort of technology issues. And given that was underfunded and, frankly, often disorganized Indonesian and Philippine security forces, (though to be fair to the Indonesians they have more or less successfully snuffed out their homegrown Islamic terrorist threat), I am sure China’s spooks can do much better. As a rule, it’s always safer to assume that all your calls are being listened to, though it’s not always easy to act on one’s own advice. The same rule applies even to mundane emails: always assume that whatever you write will someday be read by anyone who cares to try, so if you are going to boast of your sexual conquests or run down your boss, beware! If Bill Gates could have emails he thought were long permanently deleted dug up by the U.S. Feds, well, do the math.