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
“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.
