Skype provides a
"backdoor" for government employees access to everything on your computer
and every keyboard stroke
Project Chess: Skype’s secret program aimed at making calls readily available to intelligence agencies
Project Chess: Skype’s secret program aimed at making calls readily available to intelligence agencies
In yet another instance of a report indicating that tech giants worked directly with intelligence agencies to enable
government surveillance, it is now being reported
that Skype began a secret program called Project Chess to enable
intelligence agencies and law enforcement to easily get a hold of calls.
This comes after it
was revealed that Skype was part of the massive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program
known as PRISM.
The latest revelation about Skype’s secret program is quite
interesting given the controversy surrounding the privacy and security of Skype.
Indeed, the NSA leaks hinted
that Microsoft may have lied about the security of Skype, though many suspicions
were raised last year after they filed for a patent for “legal intercept” technology.
According to a New York Times report citing people briefed on the program, Project
Chess was limited to less than a dozen people inside Skype and
focused on exploring both the legal and technical issues in
making Skype calls readily available to individuals in the
intelligence and law enforcement communities.
The report also details the close relationship
between Internet giants and the NSA. Max Kelly, former chief security
officer for Facebook, for example, left the company in 2010 in order to join
the NSA.
Silicon Valley companies work closely with the NSA
because it is a mutually beneficial relationship. The Internet giants
have the data the NSA wants along with the data analytics tools they need while
the NSA has an unknown amount of money to spend.
Precise numbers for the NSA budget are impossible to maintain
given that the budget is classified.
However, Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American
Scientists’ government secrecy program, told CNN that he thinks about $10 billion go to the NSA.
Former White House budget official for national security
Gordon Adams, on the other hand, said he wouldn’t be surprised if the NSA’s
resources exceed $20 billion per year.
It’s hardly surprising that tech companies would want to work with
such a massive, powerful agency. If the New York Times report is correct,
they’re doing precisely that.
Project Chess reportedly began around five years ago, even before
the majority of the company was sold by eBay to outside investors in
2009. Skype was then purchased by Microsoft in a deal
valued at $8.5 billion which was completed in October 2011.
The project was developed as the company had “contentious talks
with the government over legal issues,” according to one person briefed on the
project.
Interestingly, it seems that when
a Skype executive stated last year that recent changes in the operation
of Skype were not made at the request of Microsoft in order
to make government spying easier, they were actually being truthful.
That is because the PRISM documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that Skype joined the
program on Feb. 6, 2011, before Microsoft even took over the company.
It’s important to note that Microsoft will no longer
affirm statements made by Skype back
in 2008 indicating that Skype calls couldn’t be wiretapped.
Unsurprisingly, Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman,
declined comment to the Times.
Yet, as Ryan Gallagher pointed out, Skype did attempt to alleviate
surveillance fears in March of this year by releasing a transparency report that claimed the
company did not hand over any Skype communications content to any
agency anywhere in the world.
“Now, though, the disclosures about PRISM and Project Chess appear
to flagrantly discredit Microsoft’s Skype eavesdropping denials,”
Gallagher noted.
“While publicly portraying Skype chats as beyond
government intrusion, the company was apparently working to grant U.S.
authorities covert access to them,” he wrote.
Ultimately, “the recent revelations illustrate that you can never
be too skeptical, and that blindly trusting large U.S. companies’ public
relations claims is unwise in an age of gag orders and secret surveillance
programs,” according to Gallagher.
The NSA’s reach extends into the hacker community, as I recently
highlighted in pointing out that NSA director and chief of the Pentagon’s Cyber
Command Gen. Keith Alexander will be giving the keynote speech at the upcoming Black Hat Conference.
Alexander also showed up at Defcon, one of the largest hacker
conferences in the world, last year to recruit hackers for the NSA.
“They’re very open about their interest in recruiting
from the hacker community,” Jennifer Granick, director of civil liberties at
the Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, said to
the Times.
They also work with people like career Air Force intelligence
officer and former director of the NSA Kenneth Minihan, who is now managing
director of Paladin
Capital Group. After he retired, Minihan also ran the NSA’s
outside professional networking organization.
Paladin is a Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm which,
according to the Times, “in part specializes in financing start-ups that offer
high-tech solutions for the N.S.A. and other intelligence agencies.”
Richard Schaeffer Jr., a former NSA executive, also sites on the
strategic advisory board of Paladin.
This makes Minihan essentially an advanced scout for the NSA,
helping the agency in their efforts to get a hold of the latest technology to
analyze and exploit the immense amount of data at their fingertips.
Paladin is one of the private companies that work closely with the
intelligence community while In-Q-Tel is directly financed by the Central
Intelligence Agency to invest in tech startups.
A wide variety of companies have received funding
from In-Q-Tel and an even wider range of companies have directly benefited from the technologies developed
thanks to intelligence community dollars.
To say the intelligence community has their fingers in just about
everything in Silicon Valley would be a bit of an understatement.
More at EndtheLie.com - http://EndtheLie.com/2013/06/20/project-chess-skypes-secret-program-aimed-at-making-calls-readily-available-to-intelligence-agencies/#ixzz2WoBGLkCo
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