China's censors tracked and stored text conversations between users of the popular Skype service, says a Canadian human rights groups. Citizen Lab, a group at the University of Toronto that specializes on politics and the Internet, issued a report on Oct. 1 that text messages sent over Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a wireless Chinese operator and eBay, which owns Skype, were monitored for political content and tagged for politically-charged topics and names. Chats by Tom-Skype users with people outside China were also monitored.

Users of Skype, which enables free calls between computers and inexpensive calls to landlines and mobile phones in many countries, can also send text messages to each other.

Citizen Lab says it uncovered the surveillance operation last month, while analyzing Web traffic. The group said it found eight computers storing more than a million text messages. One server stored messages from a special version of Tom-Skype used in Internet cafes, where many Chinese go to access the Web. "Dissidents and ordinary citizens
are being systematically monitored and tracked," the report declared.

Because the servers were poorly configured, the group was able to access the contents and figure out the key words that triggered storage of messages. They included such words as democracy, Tibet, Falung Gong and milk powder. Individual users were also tracked.
In the report, entitled "Breaching Trust," Citizen Lab declared "..the facts laid out in Breaching Trust are of such massive proportions that these other cases pale in comparison."

U.S. companies have been called to task in the past for cooperating with China's massive Internet censorship efforts, which may involve as many as 30,000 monitors. The most notorious case involved Shi Tao, a Chinese reporter who was sentenced to 10 years in jail after Yahoo provided information to authorities. Yahoo and other U.S. companies such as Google say they have no choice but to comply with the laws of the counties where they do business.

Citizen Lab says eBay executives made public statements that conversations in Skype were private after they were criticized for a text filter that prevented certain messages from being displayed. The report did not find that voice conversations in Skype were monitored. In a New York Times story, eBay only responded to the report of the server breach and did not address the censorship issue.

The full report is available at http://www.infowar-monitor.net/breachingtrust.pdf.