October 3rd, 2008
When it comes to China, is Skype the new Yahoo?
Any major Western company doing business in China is collaborating with the government to some degree. We know this. Chinese citizens know this. The best case scenario is probably Microsoft or Google’s operations where access to certain information is limited. The worst case, until now, has been Yahoo’s explicit cooperation with authorities, resulting in the imprisonment of several journalists and dissidents.
But news that the joint venture between eBay-owned Skye and Chinese wireless provider Tom was not only blocking certain messages but logging a huge database of communications may actually be more damaging to Chinese freedom.
“We may never know whether some of those people whose conversations were logged have gone to jail or have had their lives ruined in various ways as a result of this,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet expert at Hong Kong University. (Reuters)
Skype claims it didn’t know Tom was storing the communications. In a blog post, president Josh Silverman said, “It was our understanding that it was not TOM’s protocol to upload and store chat messages with certain keywords.”
But in immediate response and in that post, Skype is making a much bigger deal over the fact that CitizenLab was able to hack into the system, as the NYT reported. The spin here really calls into question just what eBay/Skype knew about the content-collection system.
Chinese bloggers are furious over the news, Reuters reports, in part because Skype or Tom appears to have gone above and beyond what was necessary.
“The problem with Skype is that they did more than what people expected. They over-satisfied the government,” said Isaac Mao, one of China’s earliest and best known bloggers.
To Tom’s defense that it was merely complying with Chinese rules and regulations, one poster to a message board mocked:
“We must interrogate you: the constitution stipulates that citizens have freedom of correspondence and of secret correspondence. Have you complied with this mother of laws?”
