UPDATED 13:30 EDT / JUNE 20 2013

NEWS

Skype’s “Project Chess” Allegedly Lets NSA Snoop On Your Calls

Despite its repeated denials over PRISM, Skype has apparently been looking at ways it can facilitate government access to its VoIP calling service for at least five years. According to the New York Times, Skype has been running a clandestine program known as Project Chess since 2008, during the time when its chief backer was eBay, years before it was acquired by Microsoft.

The allegations over Project Chess come almost a year after Skype had been accused of installing message monitoring systems into its infrastructure following its takeover by Microsoft. At that time, Skype vehemently denied any suggestion it was monitoring people’s calls, but in light of Ed Snowden’s revelations the timing certainly adds up – Skype is alleged to have signed up as a participant in PRISM in February 2011, just a few months before the Microsoft deal was announced.

According to the NYT’s sources, Project Chess is just one example of the ways in which Silicon Valley companies are attempting to build backdoor access into their servers so they can “cooperate more completely with the NSA.” Even more revealing is that the source insists that the companies “control the process themselves,” in spite of Skype and other alleged participant’s repeated denials.

The source goes on to explain that companies like Skype face “subtle but powerful pressure” from the US government to make sure that this backdoor access is as streamlined as possible. In addition, the source says that government agencies have been pumping significant amounts of cash into Big Data startups, presumably to assist them with storing and analyzing all of the data they collect.

The intrigue grows deeper if we recall that to date, Microsoft has always ‘declined to comment’ rather than insist that Skype calls cannot be monitored. Previously, most people believe that it was impossible to wiretap Skype calls, but the architectural changes in 2011 could well have made it possible to do so.

Microsoft apparently declined to comment (again) when questioned about its knowledge of Project Chess by the NYT, so we can presume that its sticking to its official position that was outlined when news of PRISM first broke:

“We provide customer data only when we receive a legally binding order or subpoena to do so, and never on a voluntary basis. In addition we only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers. If the government has a broader voluntary national security program to gather customer data we don’t participate in it.”

I’ll leave readers to make up their own minds on how much of this is to be believed, but it’s interesting to recall that it was only a few weeks ago that Microsoft was busted for monitoring instant chat messages on Skype. According to the German company Heise Security, Microsoft was caught red-handed accessing the URLs of newly created web pages that were sent through Skype’s messenger function in a test – the new sites, which had previously never been visited, logged a visit from a server known to be used by the Redmond company, meaning that it must have intercepted the chat message to see that URL. Ars Technica later followed up with its own tests and confirmed Microsoft was accessing its messages too.

At the time, Skype referred Heise to its user policy, which states:

“Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links.”

So there’s no doubt that Skype can access your chat messages, if not your calls as well. The only question is, who has access to the data it collects?


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