Customs and Border Protection Signs Major Contract With Amazon-Owned Encrypted Chat App Wickr

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is deploying the Amazon-owned encrypted chat app Wickr throughout “all components” of its operations, Motherboard reported on Tuesday, citing procurement paperwork from the company.

Whereas beforehand CBP had signed a contract price $700,000 with Wickr, the brand new settlement is valued at round $900,000. According to Motherboard, the paperwork on the contract date to Sept. 18 and state its objective as “to renew and procure additional Wickr software licenses and professional support to deploy a secure instant messaging platform for multi-purpose applications across all CBP components.” While Wickr provides a free model of its app, it additionally provides varied paid providers to the non-public sector and the federal government, together with Wickr Pro, Wickr Enterprise, and Wickr RAM, the final of which is designed to be used by the navy.

Wickr makes use of end-to-end encryption, which means messages and calls despatched through the app are totally encrypted in transit and might solely be decoded by the gadgets concerned in a dialog. Short of the invention of a flaw within the encryption protocol, this successfully makes them unimaginable for a 3rd get together to intercept and look at. Motherboard famous that Wickr RAM, which the company advertises as offering “complete security from both foreign and domestic cyber threats,” claims to be accredited by the Department of Defense. Wickr also says that RAM is “the only collaboration service with full functionality to meet all security criteria outlined” by the National Security Agency. Wickr additionally touts a function permitting all messages despatched through the app to be mechanically destroyed after a set time frame, after which they’ll supposedly by no means be recovered by any methodology.

CBP previously declined to establish to Motherboard which product was concerned within the $700,000 contract.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the acquisition of Wickr in June. Previously, its solely actual entry within the messaging house was Chime, a videoconferencing software program that doesn’t have end-to-end encryption.

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However, AWS has moved aggressively into contracting for federal police and intelligence companies, in addition to the navy. It’s no stranger to doing enterprise with CBP or its sister company Immigration and Customs Enforcement regardless of the protestations of immigration rights activists, in addition to its personal staff, a lot of whom demanded AWS stop doing business with Peter Thiel-owned ICE contractor Palantir in 2019. Many Amazon employees and some shareholders have additionally protested the corporate’s sale of its face recognition software program, Rekognition, to police.

Current face recognition technology is inherently riddled with racial and other biases. In response to widespread, nationwide protests against police brutality and racism in 2020, Amazon conceded and imposed a moratorium on police sales of face recognition tech to cops, which it recently extended “until further notice.”

Amazon also operates what has been described as the U.S.’s largest civilian surveillance network via its Ring smart doorbell cams, which police and fire departments in at least 48 states have taken advantage of by joining an Amazon program to share recordings with government officials. AWS tried to win a massive cloud computing contract for the military named JEDI, but the program was scuttled in July 2021 amid a long-running fight with fellow bidder Microsoft that had dragged on so long the Defense Department declared the plan obsolete. Instead, the military is soliciting bids from both companies for another cloud computing initiative, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability.

While CBP sees the need for technology like Wickr, federal agencies like the FBI have attacked end-to-end encryption for years, claiming it enables criminals to hide their activity from the cops. On numerous occasions, the feds have tried to force companies to build surveillance backdoors into their products to enable wiretapping, a practice that security experts are virtually unanimous would create major security vulnerabilities.

More recently, federal authorities have aimed to simply undermine confidence in encrypted communications with operations designed to send the message no platform is trustworthy. In June, the Department of Justice announced a massive bust of drug traffickers and money launderers it had tricked under a program called “Trojan Shield,” in which it used an informant to create a honeypot app (ANOM) posing as an encrypted messaging platform. Acting U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman said during a press conference that authorities had aimed “to shatter any confidence in the hardened encrypted device industry with our indictment and announcement that this platform was run by the FBI,” adding to anyone who believes they are “operating under an encrypted cloak of secrecy, your communications are not secure.”

“Today, public sector customers use Wickr for a diverse range of missions, from securely communicating with office-based employees to providing service members at the tactical edge with encrypted communications,” Stephen Schmidt, AWS vice chairman and chief data safety officer, wrote in a statement after Amazon’s acquisition of Wickr. “Enterprise customers use Wickr to keep communications between employees and business partners private, while remaining compliant with regulatory requirements.”