Friday, October 03, 2008

good job lah, China

Skype has just admitted that China has been tracking and archiving users that use specific key words such as "Tibet", "Communist Party", "Democracy" and "milk powder" (heh) in their internet chat messages. not only are the messages stored, IP addresses, usernames and "other information" are also tracked, probably sufficient to identify the senders and recipients of such "sensitive" messages. of course Skype denies any wrong-doing, they were only notified of such tracking last week.

the next question: does the Singapore government do this as well?

actually, i don't think so. i highly doubt that our civil service has the resources (or the inclination) to do something like filter and track all "politically sensitive" MSN messages, Facebook wall greetings, and emails. i also don't think MSN, Facebook or Google will be involved with some shady deal with the Singapore government. (then again, i'm not sure how much influence Singtel has....) i remember there was some concern about sms in the past, but i doubt that the government closely tracks that like they probably do in China. (i DO think there is some "loose" scanning of political blogs, forums and related websites though.)

but that's just my opinion. and since when has my opinion been a deterrent for conspiracy theories? so, in a hypothetical conspiracy theory, say the Singapore government does scan our Skype chats, MSN messages, SMS messages and what not, what would be the specific "keywords" they want to look out for?

LKY? LSH? Nepotism? FamiLEE? Lee Regime? Opposition Party? CSJ? JBJ (probably not anymore....)? PAP? WP? MIW? Gahmen? ERP? Ministers' Salaries? S377A? Mr Brown? Mee Siam Mai Hum?

and did i just shoot to the top of their list by listing all the tracked keywords in one paragraph above?

hmmmm....O_o

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Fearfully Opiniated,

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I actually have a question about your blog. Would you mind helping us with a linguistic research project? We're compiling data from various Singaporean weblogs. All it requires is checking a few boxes. If you want to take part and/or have more questions, drop me a note ( hack2301@uni-trier.de RE: Question ) so that I can then send you the 'official' project eMail. We'd really appreciate your help.

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Best regards,
- Fran