A group of Canadian human-rights activists have recently revealed that in China, Internet text conversations were being surveilled via a system that tracked sent text messages.

The aforementioned group, alongside computer security researchers, have informed that the surveillance system monitored the online conversations of Tom-Skype customers. The latter is a partnership between TOM Online, a private mobile Internet company in China that offers various online and mobile services, and Skype, which is software that enables users to make telephone calls over the Internet.

The Canadian research group, based at Citizen Lab, made the discovery last month, shedding light upon the Golden Shield Project (also called the Great Firewall of China), a Chinese government program that oversees online traffic, Web sites and blogs in search of political content.

Activists stated that they had found more than a million censored messages on eight computers in China, which they afterwards analyzed, thus managing to make out a list of restricted words. The researchers said content related to the Chinese Communist Party, Taiwan independence and the religious group Falun Gong was on the above-mentioned list.

The encrypted content is aimed at blocking the transmission of messages containing the restricted words, instead redirecting the conversation to one of the surveillance system's servers.

A report published on the Information Warfare Monitor Web site at the University of Toronto revealed that the archive on the server contained more than 166,000 censored messages that had come from a number of 44,000 users.

Pat Peterson, vice president for technology at Cisco’s Ironport group, reckoned that the Chinese government was fighting a war with the nation’s population, adding that the country was one of the most wired places worldwide.