Thursday, October 08, 2009
Are our text messages being put under surveillance?
" According to the article " Surveillance of Messages found in China" by John Markoff,
"A group of Canadian human-right activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain internet conversations that include politically charged words."The activists are based out of a Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on politics and the internet. A cluster of eight-message-logging computers in China contained more that a million censored messages. They examined these messages, and came up with a list of restricted words. These words include; words relatied to the religious group Falun Gong, earthquake and milk powder.
The list also restricts text conversations. The Tom-Skype software blocks the words from reaching its destination. The Chinese servers than retain personal information about the sender.
Apparently the Chinese government is not along in its internet surveillance.
"In 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was monitoring large volumes of telephone and internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program, intended to hunt evidence of terrorist activity, that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11 attacks."That really scares me! I hope my text messages aren't being watched!
