Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has just released its analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform. No surprises. They uncovered discovered a huge surveillance system that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words.

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.

John Markoff of the NYT has a report.

PDF of the Citizen Lab report available from here.

I’ve always assumed that Skype was compromised — which is why I would never use it for confidential conversations. Wonder what eBay have to say about it all?