U.S. Customs and Border Protection ( CBP ) is deploy the Amazon - owned encrypted chat app Wickr across “ all components ” of its operation , Motherboard reported on Tuesday , quote procurement documents from the office .
Whereas antecedently CBP had bless a contract worth $ 700,000 with Wickr , the new concord is valued at around $ 900,000 . accord to Motherboard , the documents on the contract day of the month to Sept. 18 and state its purpose as “ to renew and procure additional Wickr software licenses and professional documentation to deploy a unassailable inst electronic messaging platform for multi - purpose coating across all CBP components . ” While Wickr extend a destitute version of its app , it also declare oneself various pay services to the private sector and the government , admit Wickr Pro , Wickr Enterprise , and Wickr RAM , the last of which is designed for use by the military .
Wickr use end - to - end encoding , mean message and call ship via the app are fully encrypted in passage and can only be decoded by the devices involved in a conversation . inadequate of the discovery of a flaw in the encryption protocol , this effectively makes them out of the question for a third party to intercept and view . Motherboard take note that Wickr RAM , whichthe company advertisesas provide “ complete security from both alien and domestic cyber threats , ” claims to be accredit by the Department of Defense . Wickralso saysthat RAM is “ the only collaboration service with full functionality to meet all surety standard outlined ” by the National Security Agency . Wickr also touts a characteristic allowing all messages sent via the app to be automatically ruin after a set menses of time , after which they can purportedly never be recovered by any method .
U.S. Border Patrol agents, part of Customs and Border Protection, as they detain Central American asylum seekers near McAllen, Texas in June 2018.Photo: John Moore (Getty Images)
CBPpreviously declinedto identify to Motherboard which product was involved in the $ 700,000 declaration .
Amazon Web Services ( AWS ) announce the accomplishment ofWickr in June . Previously , its only real entry in the message space was Chime , a videoconferencing software that does n’t have end - to - end encryption .
However , AWS has moved sharply into catching for federal police force and intelligence agencies , as well as the military . It ’s no stranger to doing business with CBP or its baby federal agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement despite theprotestationsofimmigration rights militant , as well as its own employees , many of whom demandedAWS stop doing businesswith Peter Thiel - owned Methedrine contractor Palantir in 2019 . Many Amazon actor andsome shareholdershave also protested the company ’s sales event of itsface recognition software , Rekognition , to police .
Current look credit technology is inherently riddled withracial and other biases . In answer to far-flung , countrywide protests against police force brutality and racism in 2020 , Amazon profess and visit a moratorium on police force sale of face recognition technical school to cops , which it recently extended“until further notice . ”
Amazon also operate what has been described as the U.S.’slargest civilian surveillance networkvia its Ring smart doorbell cams , which police and flame departmentsin at least 48 stateshave taken reward of by connect an Amazon program to share recordings with government official . AWS adjudicate to make headway a monolithic swarm computing contract for the military named JEDI , but the programwas scuttledin July 2021 amid a long - running fight with fellow bidder Microsoft that had dragged on so long the Defense Department declared the design obsolete . Instead , the war machine is soliciting dictation from both companies for another cloud computer science initiative , theJoint Warfighter Cloud Capability .
While CBP sees the penury for engineering science like Wickr , Union agencies like the FBI have attacked goal - to - end encoding for days , claim it enables criminal to shroud their body process from the cops . Onnumerous occasion , the feds have tried to push companies to construct surveillance backdoors into their products to enable wiretapping , a practice that security expert are well-nigh unanimous would createmajor certificate vulnerabilities .
More recently , federal authorisation have aim to simply subvert assurance in encrypted communications with operations project to beam the content no platform is trustworthy . In June , the Department of Justice harbinger a monumental bust of drug marketer and money launderers it had tricked under a programcalled “ Trojan Shield,”in which it used an source to make a honeypot app ( ANOM ) posing as an encrypted message political platform . Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said during a press group discussion that authorities had aimed “ to shatter any confidence in the hardened encrypted gimmick industry with our indictment and annunciation that this platform was run by the FBI , ” adding to anyone who believe they are “ operating under an encrypted cloak of secrecy , your communications are not unattackable . ”
“ Today , public sector client use Wickr for a various range of missionary work , from securely communicating with authority - base employee to providing armed service members at the tactical bound with write in code communication , ” Stephen Schmidt , AWS vice president and main information security officer , save in a statementafter Amazon ’s acquisition of Wickr . “ initiative customers habituate Wickr to keep communication between employees and business cooperator individual , while remaining compliant with regulative requirements . ”
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