Jeffrey Knockel is an unlikely candidate to expose the inner workings of Skype's role in China's online surveillance apparatus. The 27-year-old computer-science graduate student at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque doesn't speak Chinese, let alone follow Chinese politics. "I don't really keep up with news in China that much," he says.
But he loves solving puzzles. So when a professor pulled Knockel aside after class two years ago and suggested a long-shot project — to figure out how the Chinese version of Microsoft's Skype secretly monitors users — he hunkered down in his bedroom with his Dell laptop and did it. Since then, Knockel has repeatedly beaten the ever-changing encryption that cloaks Skype's Chinese service.
This has allowed him to compile, for the first time, the thousands of terms — such as Amnesty International and Tiananmen — that prompt Skype in China to intercept typed messages and send copies to its computer servers in the country. Some messages are blocked altogether. The lists shed light on the monitoring of internet communications in China.
Skype's video phone-and-texting service there, with nearly 96 million users, is known as TOMSkype, a joint venture formed in 2005 with majority owner Tom Online, a Chinese wireless internet company. The words that are subject to being monitored , which Knockel updates almost daily on his department's website, range from references to pornography and drugs to politically sensitive terms, including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders, BBC News, and the locations of planned protests. (The system he traced does not involve voice calls.)
Knockel says his findings expose a conflict between Microsoft's advocacy of privacy rights and its role in surveillance. Microsoft, which bought Skype in 2011, is a founding member of the Global Network Initiative, a group promoting corporate responsibility in online freedom of expression. "I would hope for more," Knockel says of Microsoft. "I would like to get a statement out of them on their social policy regarding whether they approve of what TOMSkype is doing on surveillance."
On January 24, an international group of activists and rights groups published an open letter to Skype, calling on it to disclose its security and privacy practices. Microsoft, when asked for comment on Knockel's findings and activists' concerns, issued a statement it attributed to an unnamed spokesperson for its Skype unit. "Skype's mission is to break down barriers to communications and enable conversations worldwide," the statement said. "Skype is committed to continued improvement of end user transparency wherever our software is used."
Knockel says one of the most surprising findings is that the latest enhancement to TOMSkype sends information about both sender and recipient to the Chinese computer servers. That means that even users of the standard Skype programme outside China are subject to monitoring if they communicate with users of the Chinese version, he says. "If you are talking to someone using TOMSkype, you yourself are being surveilled," he says.
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