Rebecca MacKinnon looks at how Skype gave up the ghost to China’s spooks:

While Skype claims to have fixed the problem, the fact that TOM-Skype was enabling surveillance and privacy breaches in such a shocking manner for a significant period of time demonstrates that eBay/Skype as a company has not placed enough emphasis on protecting users’ rights and interests. What else is going on - or has gone on - which users don’t know about and which Skype headquarters doesn’t know about either? This incident with TOM raises questions about how trustworthy Skype as a company really is. Even if top management did not intend for such a situation to happen, the fact that it did happen shows that management has not made user rights high enough of a priority company-wide, and have failed to communicate well with their local partners about what practices are acceptable and what practices are not. This situation could have been avoided if they had really been thinking through the potential challenges and pitfalls of working with a local partner in offering a localized internet communications product in the mainland Chinese market. …

Skype complied with China’s spying more than necessary:

“HONG KONG/BEIJING (Reuters) - Savvy Internet users in China began avoiding the version of Skype offered by its Chinese partner two years ago, but news it filtered and recorded text messages has sparked new worries about the global firm’s commitment to privacy.

The U.S.-owned Web communications firm faces a backlash at home and in China for apparently allowing core principles to be compromised in order to meet the demands of Chinese censors, analysts warned.

‘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.”

Security expert Bruce Schneier on the NSA/China joint effort against Internet privacy:
“It’s hard to figure out what the endgame is; the U.N. doesn’t have the authority to impose Internet standards on anyone. In any case, this idea is counter to the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ In the U.S., it’s counter to the First Amendment, which has long permitted anonymous speech. On the other hand, basic human and constitutional rights have been jettisoned left and right in the years after 9/11; why should this be any different?
But when the Chinese government and the NSA get together to enhance their ability to spy on us all, you have to wonder what’s gone wrong with the world.”

The US and China may be cooperating to destroy Internet privacy once and for all:
“In a move that has been condemned by privacy and human rights interests the world over Washington has joined with Beijing to move forward the controversial draft issued by United Nations International Telecommunication Union working groups ‘Study Group 17’. The proposal, known as ‘Q6/17 TD 4068’ is a formal document that is currently in the draft stages which was put forward by the Chinese government. It’s purpose, to put in place a mechanism by which any communications over the Internet can be tracked back to its source. In effect, ending Internet privacy and anonymity. …
Together, these two proposals would render useless the anonymous proxies and onion routing technologies that many of China’s Internet dissidents use to protect their identities. Further more, this would not only effect those using proxy technologies to post to the Internet, but also those using them simply to read content that Beijing does not wish them to read. Additionally, the proposal would not only allow Beijing to track the source and destination of any Internet traffic originating or terminating in China, but also the source and destination of any traffic that merely passed through the Chinese Internet infrastructure on its way to/from another destination.”