McCain's hypocrisy on Chinese Skype-based surveillance

China and Skype cooperate in a massive surveillance system that in just two months spied on millions of people, and censored more than 166,000 messages from 44,000 users, reports the New York Times. Yet even though John McCain has spoken out against U.S. corporations helping China with surveillance and censorship in the past, he's silent now, possibly because one of his key advisors is Meg Whitman, a current director and former President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, which owns Skype and is a key partner in the surveillance.

The New York Times has an in-depth article about the massive and pervasive surveillance. The article quotes Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, as saying:

This is the worst nightmares of the conspiracy theorists around surveillance coming true. It's 'X-Files' without the aliens.

According to the Times:

The system tracks text messages sent by customers of Tom-Skype, a joint venture between a Chinese wireless operator and eBay, the Web auctioneer that owns Skype, an online phone and text messaging service.

A group of human-rights activists in Toronto from the group Citizen Lab uncovered the scheme. You can read their full report here. The Times says that the group found "a cluster of eight message-logging computers in China contained more than a million censored messages."

Here's how the system works: The Chinese compile a list of words they want filtered. It includes words such as "democracy," "Tibet," "communist," "Tiananmen," and others. Any text messages with those keywords are uploaded to servers in China and stored there. In addition, says the report:

These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.

In addition, other criteria appear to be used for filtering, such as specific user names.

Millions of users can be identified from those logs, which means that China, with eBay's cooperation, is engaged in a massive surveillance effort beyond any previously imagined. In addition to the surveillance, China censors many of the messages as well.

So where does McCain fit into all this? Back in November, in an interview with Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, McCain spoke out against Yahoo for cooperating with the Chinese authorities for handing information about a Chinese journalist to the Chinese police. The journalist was later jailed. McCain also criticized Google for cooperating with China.

Interestingly enough, he also had this to say about eBay and Skype:

Skype, which is owned by eBay, reportedly helps the Chinese government monitor and send through text messages.

Despite that, though, McCain was only too happy to have as a key advisor Meg Whitman, a current director and former President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay. And even though months ago he spoke out against American corporations cooperating with China, today's he's completely silent about the surveillance scheme in which eBay plays a major role.

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