Jacob Appelbaum on Skype (Skype interception - Project Chess)

[Patrice Riemens]

(bwo tetalab list)

-- Forwarded message --
From: Jacob Appelbaum 
Date: Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 4:08 PM
Subject: [liberationtech] Skype interception - Project Chess
To: "liberationt...@lists.stanford.edu" 


Hi,

I encourage all Skype users and security people to read this article
about Silicon Valley and the spying world:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-and-spy-ag
ency-bound-by-strengthening-web.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

This bit about Skype is fantastic:

"Skype, the Internet-based calling service, began its own secret
program, Project Chess, to explore the legal and technical issues in
making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law
enforcement officials, according to people briefed on the program who
asked not to be named to avoid trouble with the intelligence agencies.

"Project Chess, which has never been previously disclosed, was small,
limited to fewer than a dozen people inside Skype, and was developed
as the company had sometimes contentious talks with the government
over legal issues, said one of the people briefed on the project. The
project began about five years ago, before most of the company was
sold by its parent, eBay, to outside investors in 2009. Microsoft
acquired Skype in an $8.5 billion deal that was completed in October
2011.

"A Skype executive denied last year in a blog post that recent changes
in the way Skype operated were made at the behest of Microsoft to
make snooping easier for law enforcement. It appears, however, that
Skype figured out how to cooperate with the intelligence community
before Microsoft took over the company, according to documents leaked
by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the N.S.A. One of the
documents about the Prism program made public by Mr. Snowden says
Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.

"Microsoft executives are no longer willing to affirm statements, made
by Skype several years ago, that Skype calls could not be wiretapped.
Frank X. Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman, declined to comment.

I suspect that people will say "oh, activists don't need to worry
about the FBI or the NSA" - just remember - other intel agencies have
data sharing programs with the NSA. So a Dutch activist or a Moroccan
journalist are likely both just as screwed as an American activist
using Skype.

To the Skype promoters, apologists and deniers - I encourage you to
start using, and improving Jitsi - it needs a lot of love but it at
least has a chance of being secure, whereas Skype is beyond repair.

All the best,
Jacob


--
Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by
emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at
https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org

Re: In an Internetworked World No One Is "Foreign"

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2013 at 03:04:02PM +0200, robert adrian wrote:
 
> Whenever you get a "free offer" there is usually a catch somehwere -
> so when DARPA donated TCP IP free to the world 

The apple was never poisoned. The principals who invented packet
switching and prototyped it were all civilian, academic researchers.
The subsequent branching out of the technology into all nooks and
crannies of human endeavour is simply because it was so damn useful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

...

Misconceptions of design goals[edit]

Common ARPANET lore posits that the computer network was designed to
survive a nuclear attack. In A Brief History of the Internet, the
Internet Society describes the coalescing of the technical ideas that
produced the ARPANET:

It was from the RAND study that the false rumor started, claiming that
the ARPANET was somehow related to building a network resistant to
nuclear war. This was never true of the ARPANET, only the unrelated
RAND study on secure voice considered nuclear war. However, the later
work on Internetting did emphasize robustness and survivability,
including the capability to withstand losses of large portions of the
underlying networks.[12]

Although the ARPANET was designed to survive subordinate-network
losses, the principal reason was that the switching nodes and network
links were unreliable, even without any nuclear attacks. About the
resource scarcity that spurred the creation of the ARPANET, Charles
Herzfeld, ARPA Director (1965–1967), said:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System
that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such
a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's
mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized
had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that
there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers
in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have
access to them, were geographically separated from them.[13]

Packet switching pioneer Paul Baran affirms this, explaining: "Bob
Taylor had a couple of computer terminals speaking to different
machines, and his idea was to have some way of having a terminal speak
to any of them and have a network. That's really the origin of the
ARPANET. The method used to connect things together was an open issue
for a time."[14]




#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org