Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn
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Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41341353 - Aug 2024 (968 comments)
The comparisons to other providers is off base because either other providers are cooperating more when they possess actionable, unencrypted information and taking steps to detect or prevent such recurrences or they are like Signal and do not have access to the underlying material in the first place or store it for very long anyway.
One cannot legally run a hosted, unmoderated content platform in the developed world, one will always be required to remove illegal materials and turn over materials in cooperation with law enforcement.
A lot more and a lot less than that. Arresting this CEO in France is largely a political decision, not a politically neutral enforcement action against the Telegram platform.
They don’t perform the same enforcement against other entities they could go after.
If Telegram breaks the law - which it does - it’s completely logical that the CEO is held accountable for that and is arrested
The real conspiracy theory is: Telegram have never made any attempt to either implement full E2E or to dissuade their users for using it for politically sensitive messages. Why not?
It's probably true. There are still no e2ee chats on desktop, which includes my smartpon running GNU/Linux.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
Could be something nefarious or could be because not doing things is easier than doing things. Why bother if the existing conditions are just fine (for Telegram)?
I sincerely doubt that Telegram makes most of it's money by being this kind of host. I don't generally give the government the benefit of the doubt when it comes to _communication_ platforms. I also see zero evidence that Telegram's existence or policies help promote or create crime in any way.
It's not conspiratorial to refuse to show deference to the government which currently only has vague accusations to justify jailing a CEO. If the French government was so concerned about the criminal aspect then they should just order Telegram to not operate in France or they should work to block it at a national level.
The problem, the reaction, and the solution are not at all aligned here. Why anyone would jump in to defend the government's actions is absolutely beyond me.
If they are charging him and intend to convict, they have specific accusations, unless the French legal system is much different than the rest of the western world.
> "If the French government was so concerned about the criminal aspect then they should just order Telegram to not operate in France or they should work to block it at a national level."
Many governments with anti-CSAM laws exercise universal jurisdiction in those statues (i.e. they will to prosecute anyone for those crimes regardless of where they were committed and regardless if the person in question is a citizen), that being said it isn't entirely relevant here since the defendant is a French citizen. I would fully expect a government with CSAM accusations to prosecute those involved in facilitating such not just "block" them.
It's worth noting that the person in question was just arrested, so the trial hasn't happened yet, and yes the government could be full of shit, that would presumably come out at trial as dropped charges or an acquittal.
Precisely. So the constant need for people to gatekeep in here and chastise other people for having a negative view of the French government's actions is, to me, absurd.
> and yes the government could be full of shit
Yes. That's the assertion based upon the balance of history and probability and the complete disconnect between these actions and actual law enforcement outcomes.
> that would presumably come out at trial as dropped charges or an acquittal.
That doesn't mean we can't have a discussion about it.
One thing I did find suspicious about Telegram was that accounts that are restricted for "spam" can create a new account and pay for a premium license to remove the restrictions on the new account. Seemed like a racket to me.
Just would like to clarify, Telegram does take down channels/bots in some cases including copyright infringement. The only bots I’ve dealt with were music downloaders so I don’t know much about other kinds of takedowns, but it’s wrong to say that telegram doesn’t/didn’t take down material. Perhaps not enough or frequently enough, and I certainly don’t condone immoral activities- but they do do it sometimes.
Which is why I don’t see why certain services should be legally penalized just because they don’t happen to be E2E encrypted. Like if Telegram was instead e2e encrypted, why should that be legal if what they were previously doing wasn’t?
1) On the technical side, Telegram groups operate more like a bulletin board, content is posted and can be fetched over and over again, a bulletin board owner can be compelled to remove material and if non-cooperating considered to be facilitating. Signal is more like a conversation in the town-square or a letter box of sealed envelopes. Once the content is fetched, it's gone. If signal is made aware that certain envelopes contain material that needs to be removed, I'm sure they would do so provided they still possess them.
2) On the non-technical side, many countries have crimes that are all about who knew what and when did they know it and could that have acted (or did they have a duty to do so). Facilitating, accessory, accessory after the fact call it what you will but that's more of a legal / philosophical argument to be had about the legal system in general rather than telegram specifically. A situation were telegram was made aware of illegal activity and was hosting said content in the clear and did nothing is manifestly different from a case where those facts did not exist, in most legal systems.
I also disagree with the characterization of the discussion as "wide ranging conspiracies"... voicing concern over a government arresting a major online platform that is well known for minimal censorship shouldn't be labeled as conspiracy theories.
In some cases, selective prosecution is itself a defense; but (as you allude to) that is a very high bar for the defense to clear.
That said, the defense can say whatever they want about what they perceive as selective prosecution... but how do they know? It's not like they would have more knowledge about the prosecution's thought process than the average conspiracy theorist?
> Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel, or separate, evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to limit disclosure as to the origins of an investigation.
The specific discussion was related to a "wait-and-see" attitude in regards to the motives of the justice system of France (not the motives of the alleged perpetrator). The suggestion was that if this was politically motivated then that motive would be revealed once the discovery process began. However, if the French legal systems wants to hide a political motivation then they can use parallel construction to hide their methods, thus obscuring their motives.
Also, I didn't "describe" anything. I pointed to a Wikipedia article that, in part, declares parallel construction as supported by the Supreme Court of the US. So, at least in US law, it is not at all an abuse of power but rather a totally valid approach that law enforcement can take to build a case against someone. The entire reason I even know the terms is because it showed up so often in the TV show Law & Order.
Well, it seems that this happens too in the free world. I thought it was only my shitty hole barely third world puppet state.
We are doomed.
Yet you've started your comment with a strong speculation on why
(and it's also a bit naive to presume such things are surfaced during trial)
> as that will presumably be surfaced during the trial itself
Nothing more, nothing less
Supposedly, Telegram (and by definition of the french law, the CEO) did not respond to requests for takedown of harmful content (or not enough or faster?) from the the OFMIN. This triggered another investigation looking globally at how Telegram handle content moderation on the public part of Telegram (Channel) which lead to all others charges of complicity.
This is basically the CEO taking the fall because the (unreachable by french law) Telegram company is not on french soil and he made the mistake on landing here.
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https://i.imgur.com/ixak5vq.png
>This reminds me of the entire plot to the last of the Bourne movies, Jason Bourne, where there is a scene of the head of some intel agency (Tommy Lee Jones) propositioned a social media founder to give them backdoor access or he would be killed. Great movie.
Fun Thread:
https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1f0i2yi/guess_w...
Should you remove e.g blasphemy which is illegal in many countries including some of what I assume you call "developed world"?
Mere responding is evidently not enough, you need to cooperate.
> you might consider technical architectures that don’t leave you in direct custody and control of that content in the first place.
This rules out the "public channel" feature.
Essentially what you say boils down to a global publishing platform being impossible nowadays without random and contradictive censorship acts.
While this is probably true, I definitely don't share the "yeah throw him to jail" sentiment. On the contrary, I miss very much the truly global Internet of early 2000s. If this was possible back then, it must be, generally speaking, possible? Are we going to see anything like this again in our lifetimes?
Only if the request is coming from a country with a lot of power to effect its judgments internationally, or from a country you plan to personally visit. Whether or not you agree with it, ignoring legal requests from the US, China, and the EU (and debatably some other countries), isn't really an option in this day and age.
Until you wanted to visit a small country on vacation and forgot you ignored their court order 4 years ago.
Or you visit some random country and didn't check the extradition treaties they have with some other country you thought you'd never visit.
Or maybe new extradition treaties (yay!)
The sad conclusion I'm seeing in this story is: If you make an internet service, it's safer to just block off all the countries except the specific ones you're planning to operate in.
My answer wasn't intended to be dismissive, truly, the answer will be specific to ones legal situation and the jurisdictions they plan to operate in and are best answered specifically by competent counsel in those jurisdictions after considering ones specific facts. Asking if ones should comply with laws "anywhere in the world" is not a useful question by itself.
No HN comment is ever going into the same depth as the output of a hundred plus lawyers. But the parent points in the right general direction.
You just don't know. And so we do not even have a single local forum.
One can. I think you're confusing censored with moderated. Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc. aren't moderated. They're censored. They refuse to moderate or not moderate. Censorship is a form of moderation, but it itself isn't enough to be considered moderated. Censorship is enough to make it not unmoderated though.
That's a terribly simplistic take.
And no, there are other providers that also cooperated less (not that you have reliable data on that for such a certain claim that you can't compare)
They made a claim that Telegram are particularly unresponsive to legitimate requests from various law enforcement groups which as a statement goes isn’t particularly controversial.
You seemed to have implied that:
1. There is no way to know that.
2. “Others” cooperate even less.
Do you have inside knowledge or not?
It is so funny you put a “developed” there, as if this is an advantage compared to developing ones.
Do we know this for sure? What are the sources?
If that were true — then it surely would be less surprising, and even expected, but I would argue it's still bad: first because encryption would lead to the same result (as you point out) and second because what's illegal is often a matter of perspective: Telegram had content that was illegal in Russia, and didn't collaborate.
Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do? Specifically, these service providers? Because Google, Discord, Reddit, etc. all contain some amount of CSAM (and other illegal content), yet I don't see Pichai, Citron, or Huffman getting indicted for anything.
Hell, then there's the actual infrastructure providers too. This seems like a slippery slope with no defined boundaries where the government can just arbitrary use to pin the blame on the people they don't like. Because ultimately, almost every platform with user-provided content will have some quantity of illegal material.
But maybe I'm just being naive?
If you are alleging that there's comparable, specific and actual legal infringements on the part of meta/google, that somehow go uninvestigated and unpunished, free free to point to that.
The only E2EE in Telegram is called "secret chats" and they're 1-on-1.
i don’t think messaging startups should be required to employ hundreds of people to read messages
It was their decision to become something bigger than a simple messaging app by adding channels and group chats with tons of participants. It was also their decision to understaff content moderation team.
Sometimes the consequence is a legal action, like the one we're seeing right now. All this could have been easily avoided if they had E2EE or enough people to review reported content and remove it when necessary.
Even E2EE messaging service providers have to cooperate in terms of providing communication metadata and responding to takedown requests. Ignoring law enforcement lands you in a lot of shit everywhere, in Russia you'll just be landing out of a window.
These laws have applied for decades in some shape or form in pretty much all countries, so it shouldn't come as a surprise.
But i have no idea if it truly has more or less crime than other platforms. So we can't really tell if he's being messed with because he can't stand up for himself in a way Microsoft or Musk can, or it is truly a criminal problem.
A person witnessing a crime by itself is not a crime. However, a person witnessing a crime and choosing not to report it is a crime.
Or you can just not respond, at least in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-incrimination
If you're the witness to a murder and you're subpoena'd to court and refuse to testify then you are committing contempt of court. There was a guy in Illinois who got 20 years (reduced to 6 on appeal) for refusing to testify in a murder.
https://illinoiscaselaw.com/clecourses/contempt-of-court-max...
Contempt of court usually has no boundaries on the punishment, nor any jury trials. A judge can just order you to be executed on the spot if you say, fall asleep in his courtroom. Sheriffs in Illinois have the same unbridled power over jail detainees.
Not sure whether that extends to police questioning though.
It still exists in many jurisdictions, including the UK, the US (it is a federal crime under 18 U.S. Code § 2382, and also a state crime in most states), Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Ireland.
Related was the crime “misprision of felony”, which was failure to report a felony (historically treason was not classed as a felony, rather a separate more serious category of crime). Most common law jurisdictions have abolished it, in large part due to the abolition of the felony-misdemeanour distinction. However, in the US (which retains that distinction), it is a federal crime (18 U.S. Code § 4). However, apparently case law has narrowed that offence to require active concealment rather than merely passive failure to report (which was its original historical meaning)
Many of the jurisdictions which have abolished misprision of felony still have laws making it a crime not to report certain categories of crime, such as terrorism or child sexual abuse
That heavily depends on the jurisdiction. It's explicitly a crime in Germany, for example: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__138.html
On top of that, if you can be shown to benefit from the crime (e.g. by knowingly taking payment for providing services to those that commit it), that presumably makes you more than just a bystander in most jurisdictions anyway.
It is also only for upcoming not yet accomplished crimes. Crimes already happened don’t have to be reported.
Also it has to be proven that you received the plan in a plausibel manner.
That’s generally not true, at least in the Anglo legal system.
Obviously this is French criminal law, which is, well, wow.
https://www.debevoise.com/-/media/files/pdf/20190521_10_thin...
Who you are definitely determines how the law handles you. If you're Google execs, you don't have to worry about the courts of the peasantry.
How do you know this is the case?
Nobody's arresting Zuckerberg for that.
Not to say that deliberately making yourself blind to what's happening on your platform will always be a bulletproof way to avoid liability, but it's a much more defensible position than being able to see the illegal activity on your platform and not doing anything about it. Especially in the case of seriously serious crimes like CSAM, terrorism, etc.
The issue is law enforcement doesn't want that kind of access. Because they have no manpower to go after criminals. This would increase their caseload hundredfold within a month. So they prefer to punish the entity that created this honeypot. So it goes away and along with it the crime will go back underground where police can pretend it doesn't happen.
Telegram is basically punished for existing and not doing law enforcement job for them.
Apparently, they have. Sorry for your bet.
I bet that if they really asked, they pretty much asked Telegram to build them one click creator that would print them court ready documents about criminals on their platform so that law enforcement can just click a button and yell "we got one!" to the judge.
That's not true. For one things, it is expensive. For another, there's a chance people will find out and you'll lose all your criminal customers... they might even seek retribution.
> I bet that if they really asked, they pretty much asked Telegram to build them one click creator that would print them court ready documents about criminals on their platform so that law enforcement can just click a button and yell "we got one!" to the judge.
You seem to believe, without having looked at the publicly available facts of the matter, that the problem is law enforcement didn't say "pretty please". The fact of the matter is that they've refused proper law enforcement requests repeatedly; if anyone has been rude about it, it's been Durov.
Meta can provide conversation and account metadata (Twitter does the same - or used to do at least), or suspend accounts
You leak basic metadata (who talked to who at what time).
You leak 100% of messages with "business account", which are another way to say "e2e you->meta and then meta relays the message e2e to N reciptients handling that business account".
Then there's the all the links and images which are sent to e2e you->meta, meta stores the image/link once, sends you back a hash, you send that hash e2e to your contact.
there's so many leaks it's not even fun to poke fun at them.
And I pity anyone who is fool enough to think meta products are e2e anything.
actually its a nominated end point, and then from there its up to the business. It works out better for meta, because they aren't liable for the content if something goes wrong. (ie a secret is leaked, or PII gets out.) Great for GDPR because as they aren't acting as processor of PII they are less likley to be taken to court.
Whatsapp has about the same level of practical "privacy" (encryption is a loaded word here) as iMessage. The difference is, there are many more easy ways to report nasty content in whatsapp, which reported ~1 million cases of CSAM a year vs apples' 267. (not 200k, just 267. Thats the whole of apple. https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/202...)
Getting the content of normal messages is pretty hard, getting the content of a link, much easier.
Its not signal, but then its never meant to be.
https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-...
For iMessage, Apple can just add a fake iDevice to your account and now iMessage will happily encrypt everything to that new key as well and there's zero practical visibility to the user. If it was a targeted attack and not blanket surveillance then there's no way the target is going to notice. You can open up the keychain app and check for yourself but unless you regularly do this and compare the keys between all your Apple products you can't be sure. I don't even know how to do that on iPhone.
and show that fb eclipse everyone by a insane margin it's scary!
about your point on business accounts, the documents i reviewed included dialog tree bots managed by meta. not sure if not having that change things... but in that case it was spelled out that meta is the recipient
In whatsapp, the report button is on the same menu that you use to reply/hide/pin/react.
Once you do that, it sends the offending message to meta, unencrypted. To me, that seems like a reasonable choice. Even if you have "proper" e2ee, it would still allow rooting out of nasty/illegal shit. those reports are from real people, rather than automated CSAM hashing on encrpyted messages. (although I suspect there is some tracking before and after.)
Its the same with instagram/facebook. The report button is right there. I don't agree with FB on many things, but this one I think they've made the right choice.
Learn more: https://about.meta.com/actions/safety/audiences/law/guidelin...
Yes, WA messages are supposed to be e2e encrypted. Unless end-to-end encryption is prohibited by law in your jurisdiction, I don't see how that question is relevant in this context.
It is supposedly end-to-end encrypted. And in a shallow way. Also the app is closed source and you can't develop your own.
It's basically end-to-end-trust-me-bro-level encrypted.
That should scare a lot of us.
This tells me most of the people implementing this are either too-scared of the consequences, or they think what they're implementing is ethical and/or the right thing to do. Again, both are scary thoughts we should be highly concerned about in a healthy society that talks about these things.
One other potential explanation: FB and these large behemoths have compartmentalized the implementations of these features so much that no one can speak authoritatively about it's encryption.
The simplest explanation: when peope start at facebook/meta they leave their ethics at the door on the first day in the role.
It’s cynical, but does explain a lot: many people will pick the fat paycheque over their ethics any day, particularly in the US (where money is king)
The secondary business idea it to tie their users logins to their real world identities, to the point of repeatedly locking out users who they live under threat and refuse to disclose their real name.
I can see how it's frustrating, but the communities you're trying to post in are essentially offloading their moderation burden onto the big popular subreddits with low requirements -- if you can prove you're capable of posting there without getting downvoted into oblivion, you're probably going to be less hassle for the smaller moderator teams.
I'm not particularly interested in spending a lot of time posting on reddit. But very occasionally I'll come across a thread I can contribute meaningfully to and want to comment. Even if allowed I'd probably just make a couple comments a year or something. But I guess the site isn't set up for that, so fuck it.
Years ago there was a case where someone built a business out of making hidden compartments in cars. He did an amazing job of making James Bond style hidden compartments that perfectly blended into the interior. He was later arrested because drug dealers used his hidden compartment business to help their drug trade.
There was an uproar about the fact that he wasn’t doing the drug crimes himself. He was only making hidden compartments which could be used for anything. How was he supposed to know that the hidden compartments were being used for illegal activities rather than keeping people’s valuables safe during a break-in?
Yet when the details of the case came out, IIRC, it was clear that he was leaning into the illegal trades and marketing his services to those people. He lost his plausible deniability after even a cursory look at how he was operating.
I don’t know what, if any, parts of that case apply to Pavel Durov. I do like to share it as an example of how intent matters and how one can become complicit in other crimes by operating in a manner where one of your selling points is that you’ll help anyone out even when their intent is to break the law. It’s also why smart corporate criminals will shut down and walk away when it becomes too obvious that they’re losing plausible deniability in a criminal enterprise.
If you are directly aiding and abetting without any plausible attempt to minimize bad actors from using your services then absolutely.
For example, CP absolutely exists on platforms like FB or IG, but Meta will absolutely try to moderate it away to the best of their ability and cooperate with law enforcement when it is brought to their attention.
And like I have mentioned a couple times before, Telegram was only allowed to exist because the UAE allowed them to, and both the UAE and Russia gained ownership stakes in Telegram by 2021. Also, messaging apps can only legally operate in the UAE if they provide decryption keys to the UAE govt because all instant messaging apps are treated as VoIP under their Telco regulation laws.
There have been plenty of cases where anti-Russian govt content was moderated away during the 2021 protests - https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat...
isn't this the definition of "criminal lawyer"?
If you are a criminal lawyer who is directly abetting in criminal behavior (eg. a Saul Goodman type) you absolutely will lose your Bar License and open yourself up to criminal penalties.
If you are a criminal lawyer who is in a situation where your client wants you to abet their criminal behavior, then you are expected to drop the client and potentially notify law enforcement.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1dd32ji/brian_s...
More interesting is why the judge and prosecutors have not been referred to the bar for their illegal actions.
Not a lawyer myself but I believe this is not a correct representation of the issue.
A lawyer abetting in criminal behaviour is committing a crime, but the crime is not offering his services to criminals, which is completely legal.
When offering their services to criminals law firm or individual lawyers in most cases are not required to report crimes they have been made aware of under the attorney-client privilege and are not required to ask to minimize bad actors from using their services.
In short: unless they are committing crimes themselves, criminal lawyers are not required to stay clear from criminals, actually, usually the opposite is true.
Again, presumption of innocence do exists.
In this case, Telegram showed bad faith moderation. They are not a lawyer, and don't operate with the same constraints.
… client wants you to abet their criminal behavior, then you are expected to drop the client and potentially notify law enforcement.
When in doubt, ask.
I was replying to
any plausible attempt to minimize bad actors from using your service
I mentioned criminal lawyers because their job is literally to "offer their services to criminals or to people accused of being criminals" and they have no obligation whatsoever to minimize bad actors from using your service, in fact bad actors are usually their regular clientele and they are free to attract as many criminals as they like in any legal way they like.
Helping a criminal to commit a crime it's an entirely different thing and anyway it must be proved in a court, it's not something that can be assumed on the basis of allegations (their clients are criminal, so they must be criminal too).
That's why in that famous TV drama Jessy Pinkam says "You dont want a criminal lawyer, you want a Criminal. Lawyer.".
The premise of this story is that Telegram offers a service which is very similar to safe deposit boxes, the bank it's not supposed to know what you keep in there hence they are not held responsible if they are used for illegal activities.
In other words most of the times people do not know and are not required to know if they are dealing with criminals, but, even if they did, there are no legal reasons to avoid offering them your services other than to avoid problems and/or on moral grounds (which are perfectly understandable motives, but are still not a requirement to operate a business).
Take bars, diners, restaurants, gas stations or hospitals, are they supposed to deny their services?
And how would they exactly should take actions to minimize bad actors from using your service?
If someone goes to a restaurant and talks about committing a crime, is the owner abetting the crime?
I guess probably not, unless it is proven beyond any reasonable doubt that he actually is.
It doesn't matter if it's true or false it only matters what the justice system can prove.
This is the issue. Web platforms DO NOT have that kind of legal protection - be it Telegram, Instagram, or Hacker News.
Safe Harbor from liability in return for Content Moderation is expected from all internet platforms as part of Section 230 (USA), Directive 2000/31/EC (EU), Defamation Act 2023 (UK), etc.
As part of that content moderation, it is EXPECTED that you crack down on CP, Illicit Drug Transactions, Threats of Violence, and other felonies.
Also, that is NOT how bank deposit boxes work. All banks are expected to KYC if they wish to transact in every major currency (Dollar, Euro, Pound, Yen, Yuan, Rupee, etc) and if they cannot, they are expected to close that account or be cut off from transacting in that country's currency.
> That's why in that famous TV drama Jessy Pinkam says "You dont want a criminal lawyer, you want a Criminal. Lawyer.".
First, it's Pinkman BIATCH not Pinkam.
And secondly, Jimmy McGill (aka Saul Goodman) was previously suspended by the NM Bar Association barely 5 years before Breaking Bad, and was then disbarred AND held criminally liable when SHTF towards the finale.
e2e encryption cannot be broken though
> Safe Harbor from liability in return for Content Moderation is expected from all internet platforms as part of Section 230 (USA), Directive 2000/31/EC (EU), Defamation Act 2023 (UK), etc.
I have no sympathy for Durov and I don't care if they throw away the keys, but what about Mullvad then?
I guess that a service whose main feature is secrecy and anonymity should at least provide anonymity and secrecy.
> CP, Illicit Drug Transactions, Threats of Violence, and other felonies
you understand better than me that the request is absurd all of this is in theory, in practice nobody can actually do it for real, the vast majority of illicit clear text content are honeypots created by agents of various agencies to threaten the platforms and force them to cooperate. nothing's new here, but let's not pretend that this is to prevent crimes.
also: the allegations against Telegram are that they do not cooperate, but we don't actually know if they really crack down on CP or other illegal activities or not, because if they don't, the reasonable thing to do would be to shut down the platform, what does arresting the CEO accomplish? (rhetorical question: they - I don't want to throw names, but i think that the usual suspects are involved - want access to and control of the content, closing the platform would only deny them access and would create uproar among the population - remember when Russia blocked Telegram?)
also 2: AFAIK Telegram requires a phone number to create an account, it's the responsibility of the provider to KYC when selling a phone number, not Telegram's.
also 3: safe deposit boxes are not necessarily linked to bank accounts. I pay for a safety deposit box in Switzerland but have no Swiss bank account.
So my guess is EU wants in some way control the narrative in Telegram channels where the vast majority of the news regarding the war in Ukraine spread from the war front to the continent.
> First, it's Pinkman BIATCH not Pinkam.
Sorry. I'm dyslexic and English is not my mother tongue, but the 4th language I've learned, when I was already a teenager.
> was previously suspended by the NM Bar Association
that was the point. TV dramas need good characters and a criminal lawyer who's also a criminal is more interesting than a criminal lawyer who's just a plain boring lawyer that indulges in no criminal activity whatsoever.
This is precisely why Republicans want to repeal it - if they succeed, it would effectively force Facebook etc to allow any content.
Is this true? After decades now of a cat and mouse game, it could be argued that they are simply incapable. As such, the "best of their ability" would be using methods that don't suit their commercials - e.g verifying all users manually, requiring government ID, reviewing all posts and comments before they're posted, or shutting down completely.
I understand these methods are suicidal in capitalism, but they're much closer to the "best of their ability". Why do we accept some of the largest companies in the world shrugging their shoulders and saying "well we're trying in ways that don't impact our bottom line"?
Your analogy is terrible and doesn’t make sense.
If you provide a service that is used for illegal behavior AND you know it’s being used that way AND you explicitly market your services to users behaving illegally AND the majority of your product is used for illegal deeds THEN you’re gonna have a bad time.
If one out of ten thousand people use your product for illegal deeds you’re fine. If it’s 9 out of 10 you probably aren’t.
This logic clearly makes the prison of someone like the owner of Telegram difficult to justify, since 99.999% of messages in telegram are completely legal.
This really isn’t that complicated.
Keep in mind that as soon as you store user accounts you keep user data, which is perhaps a trivial form of eavesdropping, but clearly something law enforcement takes an interest in.
You’re making the opposite point of what you intended.
Any source for that? Media loves to blame banks for everything, but when you go into the details it always seems pretty marginal (e.g. the HSBC Mexico stuff).
A bank will drop you if they even think you might be doing something (demonstrably on paper) illegal. When opening an account, some of the very first questions a bank asks you are "where did you get this money" and "what do you do for work" - proactively making you responsible for committing to some type of story. All of the illegality you're trying to reference is happening under a backdrop of reams of paperwork that make it look like above board activity to compliance departments. Without that paperwork when shit does hit the fan, people working at the bank do tend to go to jail. But with that paperwork it's "nobody's fault" unless they manage to find a few bank employees to pin it on.
Needless to say, this type of prior restraint regime being applied to free-form communication would be an abject catastrophe.
Why aren't all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.
The usual metaphor is child pornography, but let's pick something less outrageous: espionage. If a spy uses your messaging platform to share their secrets without being detected & prevented, that's using the service to commit a crime. Now, if you're making a profit from said service, that doesn't necessarily make you a criminal, but if you start saying "if spies used this platform, they'd never be stopped or even detected", that could get you in to some serious trouble. If you send a sales team to the KGB to encourage them to use the platform, even more so.
The second amendment gives weapon makers some extra protection in the US, but they do have to be very careful about what they do and do not do in order to avoid going to jail.
> They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.
Do you have the stats on that? I don't, but I'm curious. While I don't doubt the vast majority of people using Telegram aren't committing a crime, I know that the vast majority of people using guns also aren't committing a crime.
That's because you're assuming facts not in evidence and painting the broadest possible argument. Obviously we don't know the details yet, but it's not unlikely that this situation was a bit more specific.
Consider:
F: "We want you to give us the chat logs of this terrorist"
T: "OK!"
F: "Now we need you to give us the logs from this CSAM ring"
T: "No! That's a violation of their free speech rights!"
However, I still argue that wanting to provide secret communication (which Telegram actually doesn't do) is not abetting crime or helping it more than any other product.
In fact, in my humble opinion, it's the opposite: Private communications are a countermeasure against the natural tendency of governments to become tyrannical, and thus maintaining one is an act of heroism.
That's an easy enough statement in the abstract, but again it doesn't speak to the case of "Durov knowingly hid child porn consumers from law enforcement", which seems likely to be the actual crime. If you want to be the hero in your story, you need to not insert yourself into the plot.
The IRS actually expects you to report income earned from illegal activities, they _explicitly_ state this in Publication 17.
Cash isn't income. It's an asset. You don't even report assets. You report income, and you have to specify where it came from.
is it what happened here?
in my view Durov is the owner renting his apartment and not caring what people do inside it, which is not illegal, someone could go as fare as say that it is morally reprensible, but it's not illegal in any way.
It would be different if Durov knew but did not report it.
Which, again, doesn't seem what happened here and it must be proven in a court anyway, I believe everyone in our western legal systems still has the right to the presumption of innocence.
Telegram not spying on its users is the same thing as Mullvad not spying on its users and not saving the logs. I consider it a feature not a bug, for sure not complicity in any crime whatsoever.
Problem is if you know what these people do inside it and you don't do anything about it.
Problem is if the police arrests the owner of the apartment but not those doing something illegal inside it.
Out of metaphor: Durov has been arrested because he's Russian and the west is retaliating as hard as they can.
Under the same assumptions Durov has been arrested for, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey should be in jail too. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/04/twitter-saudi-...
That guy who built the hidden compartments should absolutely not have gone to jail. The government needs to be put in check. This has gotten ridiculous.
It's not whether the platform is being used for illegal activity (all platforms are to some extent, as your facile comment shows). It's whether the operator of a platform actively avoids cooperating with LE to stop that activity once found.
The real goal is hurting anyone that’s not aligned with people in power regardless of who is getting helped or harmed. Everyone knows this but so many people in this thread are lying about it.
AFAIK these goals _are_ applied to equivalent services. It's just that twitter, FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, and all the others _do_ put in the marginal amount of effort required to remove/prohibit illicit activity on their platform.
Free speech is one thing, refusing to take down CSAM or drug dealing operating in the open is always going to land you in hot water.
I think it’s wrong on social media for the exact same reason it’s wrong to arrest power companies if a guy staples printed CSAM to a utility pole. Same thing for monitoring private phone calls. We know that AI can detect people talking about terrorism on the phone and cameras can monitor paper ads and newsletters in public spaces, but nobody would advocate for making this a legal requirement because it’s insane. The fact that nobody cares is proof that the public does value privacy and free speech. Why are so many of them tricked into thinking the internet is an exception?
I want people to commit to their beliefs and either admit they want surveillance wherever it’s technically feasible or give up and recognize that internet surveillance is also wrong. No more of this “surveillance is good but legacy platforms are exempt” waffling. Very frustrating and only serves the interests of people who already have power
> for the exact same reason it’s wrong to arrest power companies if a guy staples printed CSAM to a utility pole
That seems like a bad analogy. A closer one would be that I rent the pole space to people who I am told by law enforcement are committing serious crime in the open, using the pole I am renting to them. Additionally, I am uniquely capable of a) removing the printouts b) passing on whatever information I have about those involved (maybe zero, but at least I say that). The issue is refusing both. I don't feel they are egregious requests.
(this is not a tacit approval of digital surveillance)
I was very disappointed to hear that UFO related subreddits take down and block UFO sightings. What’s the whole point of the sub if they censor the relevant content.
Those listings were great and well documented up until about 2019 or so. They've been scrubbed heavily.
In the English wiki it’s a group “Guerilla Skepticism” which dominates the field on esoteric content and much more.
In Germany we have the same situation and very likely every language has the same issue.
The bigger pictures is that the whole content from Wikipedia gets fed into the AIs and then it answers you practically the strongly moderates censored misleading content from Wikipedia.
The very disappointing thing is that nobody can’t to anything about the mods in Wikipedia, they dominate the place.
In the EU, Telegram blocked access to certain channels that the EU deemed to be Russian disinformation, for example.
They cooperated to some degree, but I'll go out on a limb to say that the authorities wanted Telegram to be fully subservient to western government interests.
15 years ago in the US this would have been uncontroversial
Personally I'm undecided about whether these channels should be publicly available on e.g. free TV channels, but that's getting off topic.
there are other low-hanging fruit EU governments could do to address crime, NL has basically become a narcostate and they are just sitting by and watching - Telegram is not the problem.
Empirically speaking, governments have had absolutely zero success at this, but their attempts to do so have gotten them the kind of legal power over your life that organised crime could only dream about.
You could certainly argue that RICO was too powerful and is often misapplied, but I've never before seen anyone argue that it has been ineffective.
However, my GP comment was against the claim that “The state has no business judging the truth”. That claim as stated is absurd, because judging what is true is necessary for a state being able to function in the interest of its people. The commenter likely didn’t mean what they wrote.
One can argue what is harmful and what isn’t, and I certainly don’t agree with many things that are being over-moderated. But please discuss things on that level, and don’t absolutize “free speech”, or argue that authorities shouldn’t care about what is true or not.
This empty saying is used to justify basically any violation of civil liberty, because it is unprincipled and open ended, so it can be used to respond to any action anyone can take
> The commenter likely didn’t mean what they wrote
No, I meant what I wrote. The government has no business judging the truth. What is the Russian disinformation from earlier in this thread? For example, is it discussing the illegal 2014 coup in Ukraine that ousted a democratically elected government that was friendly to Russia? To EU overlords, discussing that event is “spreading disinformation” even though it is factually true and deserving of discussion. It’s a great example of political censorship being a problem.
> don’t absolutize “free speech”, or argue that authorities shouldn’t care about what is true or not.
Free speech should be absolutized in day to day discussion, even if there are very limited exceptions in the law. It’s when there is permission from society to limit speech that populations end up propagandized and suppressed by whoever has power over them. That’s what is happening here, where people are coming up with absurd mental gymnastics to justify France’s authoritarian actions.
> judging what is true is necessary for a state being able to function in the interest of its people
This sounds like support for Soviet or China style control of speech, and labeling of anything that power disagrees with as misinformation. Authorities shouldn’t care about what is true or not, because they are biased and corrupted by their agendas and ideologies and incentives. The free exchange of information is foundational to any free and democratic society. That’s what is necessary for a state to be able to function in the interest of its people.
The state can judge truth without censoring; and of course it should.
I suspect the other commenter isn't a censorship apologist and meant what they said. But feel free to decide what is likely true for the rest of us.
In other words, Apple and Google are the only authorities they recognize (see also [1]). I'm not surprised this doesn't sit well with many governments.
One would hope that there is clear evidence to support a claim that they’re well aware what they’re profiting off and aren’t aggressively shutting it down.
To use Reddit as an example: in the early days it was the Wild West, and there were some absolutely legally gray subreddits. They eventually booted those, and more recently even seem to ban subreddits just because The Verge wrote an article about how people say bad things there.
I hope his situation isn't similar to Dotcom's, as Dotcom was shown to be complicit in the crimes he was being persecuted for. Convicting the megaupload people would've been a LOT harder if they hadn't been uploading and curating illegal content on their platform themselves.
As a service provider, you're not responsible for what your users post as long as you take appropriate action after being informed of illegal content. That's where they're trying to get Telegram, because Telegram is known to ignore law enforcement as much as possible (to the point of doing so illegally and getting fined for it).
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/son-el-chapo-another-si...
Or the ability of journalists to inform the public of what the government is getting on with in their name. If the government is investigating their critics they have no right to keep it a secret.
Because in your eyes it is so gradual the difference between it's happening slowly and not happening at all is imperceptible and impossible to prove.
It's extremely straightforward to prove. You look at the laws that have been passed and the court opinions issued in the last 30-60 years.
(French) https://www.sudouest.fr/economie/reseaux-sociaux/le-patron-d...
It could have been a warrant that was not communicated to Durov himself. This would have helped to catch him by surprise.
From what I can tell the warrant has been out for longer, but he was arrested when the airport police noticed his name was on a list. There's not a lot of information out there, with neither the French authorities nor Telegram providing any official statements to the media.
You don't step foot on a country with an extradition treaty, even less so the country itself, where you're flouting their warrants for your company's data.
https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/a-golden-opportunity-f...
And of which he’s a citizen, fwiw
> the operators of the messenger app Telegram have released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in several cases. According to SPIEGEL information, this was data from suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it is still difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.
https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/chat-apps-government-ties-a...
> two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
Double Ratchet [1] is also used by WhatsApp (2B+ users) and IETF MLS [2] standard for E2EE group messaging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm
[2] https://www.ietf.org/blog/mls-secure-and-usable-end-to-end-e...
Nothing in this comment is about the US government funding Signal's encryption.
Click link -> About -> About our fundinghttps://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/-i-m-not-leaving---kim-do...
1) There was an order signed recently. He has not physically left NZ yet. 2) He's not convicted, he hasn't been in front of a judge for the charges against him
This is just a gimmick to bamboozle judges and the public. The ploy is to claim that someone is guilty of serious offense A because you proved they committed less serious offense B, even though the offenses have different elements and penalties.
They use the ploy because any large organization by definition has a lot of people in it and copyright infringement is pretty common, so by the law of large numbers somebody in the company is probably doing it even if the company doesn't want them to and then the prosecutors want to claim that the company as a whole is doing something wrong and has to be shut down. Which doesn't make any sense when another company is just going to provide the same perfectly legal service and the users are going to use it for the exact same thing.
Moreover, the obvious way for companies to prevent this -- indeed, the thing Megaupload's replacement started doing after the original was shut down -- is to encrypt everything so their employees have no access to it. Which I have no objection to, but if courts and prosecutors like to be able to issue a subpoena and actually get something back, they might want to reconsider turning the ability of a company to access data into a liability.
Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do
[...]
maybe I'm just being naive?
Back in the 1990s the tech community convinced itself (myself included) that Napster had zero ethical responsibility for the mass piracy it enabled. In reality, law in a society is supposed to serve that society. The tech community talked itself into believing that the only valid arguments were for Napster. In hindsight, it's less cut-and-dry.
I have never believed E2EE to be viable, in the real world, without a back-door. It makes several horrendous kinds of crime too difficult to combat. It also has some upsides, but including a back-door, in practice, won't erase the upsides for most users.
It is naive to think people (and government) will ignore E2EE; a feature that facilitates child porn, human trafficking, organized crime, murder-for-hire, foreign spying, etc etc. The decision about whether the good attributes justify the bad ones is too impactful on society to defer to chat app CEOs.
If you believe privacy not inspectable by law enforcement is wrong the prerequisite is saying that you're willing to have the the law apply to you as well.
How could they have any moral responsibility for ethically neutral thing other people were doing?
Law is a way to enforce a policy on massive scale, sure. But there is no guarantee that it enforces things that are aiming the best equilibrium of everyone flourishing in society. And even when it does, laws are done by humans, so unless they results from a highly dynamic process that gather feedback from those on which it applies and strive to improve over time, there is almost no chance laws can meet such an ambitious goal.
What if Napster was a symptom, but not of ill behavior? Supposing that unconditional sharing cultural heritage is basically the sane way to go can be backed on solid anthropological evidences, over several hundred millennia.
What if information monopolies is the massive ethical atrocity, enforced by corrupted governments which were hijacked by various sociopaths whose chief goal is to parasite as much as possible resources from societies?
Horrendous crimes, yes there are many out there, often commissioned by governments who will shamelessly throw outrageous lies at there citizens to transform them into cannon fodders and other atrocities.
Regarding fair retribution of most artists out there, we would certainly be better served with universal unconditional net revenue for everyone. The current fame lottery is just as fair as a national bingo as a way to make a decent career.
Few things would please me more than to live under a system where arts and culture were freely available to all, and artists didn't have to starve in the process. It doesn't strike me as far-fetched either; it wouldn't take much to improve on the system we currently have.
But my original point was that, given the society we actually had when Napster came along, it was unreasonable for Napster unilaterally to decide for everyone else that existing laws and expectations no longer mattered.
Yes, this happened, is happening and will happen.
I wonder however if the word "often" may perhaps be misleading or even completely wrong.
If you pick one random victim of a horrendous crime today in a western society. Feel free to pick the minority most hated by that society. What is the likelihood that that crime was commissioned by the government? It's more likely domestic violence, trafficking etc done by fellow community members.
Sure there are examples of governments shooting civilian planes in the sky or ferries in the and covering up. And it's perfectly sensible to be outraged when that happens. But jumping to the conclusion that "the government" just does those things as a matter of routine doesn't sound right to me. I don't buy it. It smells conspiratorial thinking and requires extraordinary proof.
Now that automated mass surveillance actually makes it possible for the states to keep tabs on just about everything, E2EE, if anything, merely rebalances the scales (although even that is overselling it - in practice, with modern surveillance tools, the scales are still much more heavily tilted in favor of those surveilling).
To what extent people really want to embrace the panopticon is not so clear-cut. It is certainly something heavily pushed from above, and in many societies that does seem to be reflected in public opinion (e.g. UK) - but not in all, so I do not think it can be reasonably assumed to be the default.
If that would be the case he would be at least a accomplice if not even the Initiator of criminal activities.
Otherwise it would be just an abuse of his service by criminals.
WORSE, you get banned for reporting CSAM to Discord, and I guarantee if you report it to the proper authorities (FBI) they tell them to bug off and get a warrant. Can we please be consistent? If we're going to hold these companies liable for anything, let's be much more consistent. Worse yet, Discord doesnt even have End to End encryption, and the number of child abuse scandals on that platform are insane. People build up communities, where the admins (users, not Discord employees) have perceived power, users (children) want to partake in such things. Its essentially the Roblox issue all over again, devs taking advantage of easily impressionable minors.
Reddit isn't much better. [1]
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/14sx8fz/discord...
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/25/22399306/reddit-lawsuit-c...
Edit:
I think the lack of bulk reporting is a pain too. They used to ask for more context. One time I reported a literal nazi admin (swastika posting, racial slurs, and what have you), but the post was "months old" and they told me essentially to "go screw myself" they basically asked why I was in the server.
There is a legal distinction here between what happens on your platform despite your best efforts (what you might call "incidental" use) vs what your platform is designed specifically to do or enable.
Megaupload is a perfect example. It was used to pirate movies. Everyone knew it. The founders knew it. You can't really argue it's incidental or unintended or simply that small amount that gets past moderation.
Telegram, the authorities will argue, fails to moderate CSAM and other illegal activity to the point that it enables it and profits from it, which is legally indistinguishable from specifically designing your platfrom for it.
Many tech people fall into a binary mode of thinking because that's how tech usually works. Either your code works or it doesn't. You see it when arguments about people pirating IP being traced to a customer. Tech people will argue "you can't prove it's me". While technically true, that's not the legal standard.
Legal standards relay on tests. In the ISP case, authorities will look at what was pirated, was it found on your hard drive, was the activity done when you were home or not and so on to establish a balance of probabilities. Is it more likely that all this evidence adds up to your guilt or that an increasingly unlikely set of circumstances explains it where you're innocent?
In the early days of Bitcoin I stayed away (to my detriment) because I coudl see the obvious use case of it being used for illegal stuff, whichh it is. The authorities don't currently care. Bitcoin however is the means that enables ransomware. When someone decides this is a national security issue, Bitcoin is in for a bad time.
Telegram had (for the French at least) risen to the point where they considered it a serious enough issue to warrant their attention and the full force of the government may be brought to bear on it.
That would seem to be the key bit. Makes one wonder what level of cooperation is required to not be charged with a slew of the worst crimes imaginable. Is there a French law requiring that messaging providers give up encryption keys that he is known to be in violation of?
2000/31/EC[2], states that providers are generally not liable for the content they host IF they do not have actual knowledge of illegal activity or content AND upon obtaining such knowledge, they take action and remove and disable access to that content(telegram has been ignoring those). Service providers have no general obligation to monitor but they need to provide notice and take down mechanisms. Assuming that their statement are correct, and they had no idea, they should be in the clear. Telegram provides a notice and take down mechanism. But saying that there are channels with +500k subscribers filled with people celebrating a 4 year old girl with a blown off leg in Ukraine and no one has reported it in 2 and a half years after it was created is indeed naive.
Nor does it require a third party client. In fact, in this regard, Telegram official client is slightly better because they have reproducible builds for iOS, while Signal, last I checked, does not (they do have them for Android).
I’m not a fan of this arrest and I don’t believe service providers have a duty to contravene their security promises so as to monitor their users.
But it seems pretty obvious that governments find the monitoring that Google / Reddit / etc do acceptable, and do not find operation of unmonitorable services acceptable.
> do not find operation of unmonitorable services acceptable.
Sounds like something straight out of a dystopian surveillance state novel, very bad outlook if true.
Aside, warrant canaries have never been actually tested in court and the common consensus is that they wouldn't fly in reality if they were ever contested.
We have no way to know this, and (unlike Signal), Telegram doesn't give us best-effort assurances by doing things like open-sourcing its code.
Either way, you're saying the MTProto is binary? How do you mean that?
Pretending you misunderstand what I meant is detestable.
XMPP and Matrix services run open source software such as ejabberd
The integrity of your conversation with someone would then depend on both your endpoints, clients, and the respective server.
Just like email, but for chat. There is no single gatekeeper who is allowed to use the network.
> global network consists of servers run by many independent entities
This is not the case for all the popular chat apps including Signal which uses centralized servers which they run themselves. They clearly see little benefit from this distributed independent server model.
And even that doesn't mean the server is open source.
As I explained earlier if you cannot audit the physical server you are connected to, claiming it's open source is useless. FYI that's literally how the term open source was used in this context!
> The integrity of your conversation with someone would then depend on both your endpoints, clients, and the respective server.
Client to client verification simply works and eliminates the need to also "verify" the server which if compromised introduces an even higher risk of contamination in the trust model (too many co-dependent functions are delegated to the server), not to mention collusion in establishing integrity of yet another device that we need to trust.
An IM platform server can be open sourced. Just like any kind of software.
It's just a matter of publishing your code and, preferably making it possible to verify that the service your users are connecting to is build using the same published code.
Typically, the way it goes is that you implement e2ee such that even a fully compromised server cannot read the clients messages, publish the client's source code, and build it yourself or use reproducible builds. That ladt part is where you can criticize Signal. Whether they publish the server code is mostly irrelevant unless you want to run a separate messenger infrastructure.
Or if you S2S federate with the upstream server. Which is a core differentiator of XMPP and Matrix. Signal server(s) notably supported proper federation during their initial growth-phase but famously closed it off ("The ecosystem is moving").
Similar story as Google [Chat/Talk/Hangouts], which did federate over XMPP before they closed that down years ago.
Open client code and documented protoccols are much more important. If you can compile your own client from open source code and it works fine, then you can know for sure what you're sending to the server.
Well, other than his arrest ;-)
When an authoritarian govt is calling for the release of someone who runs a "private" messenger, it suggests they have a back door. Otherwise they tend to oppose all private messaging.
Most western countries do horrific things we do not find acceptable, but when we do find out we hand wave it away because they're the "good guys".
Good thing it’s legal to say so in the countries that dominate its user base.
It came very close to this during Covid, and maybe once or twice since then.
You're free to say what you want, and everyone is free to ignore you if what you say doesn't jive with "common sense".
Well the embassy is complaining about this arrest, so maybe that's just counter-intelligence.
And then, he is also on Putin's wanted list; his arrest could one day turn him into a valuable bargaining chip.
It’s French national law, not EU (though the EU will copy for sure).
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/whats-going-frances-onl...
Also now they have added “because people watch football matches illegally on Telegram”. So they are going to throw everything at kitchen sink at Durov, probably also national security issues because anti-French political groups use Telegram in Africa.
Also it is still the investigative phase but the suspicion is warranted completely.
I seriously do not understand low moral people shielding those helping criminals, do you really not knowing what are you doing, seriously, just because there is a - misleadingly presented - popular service there? Really? Very worrying the moral state of social media user masses.
Well Tucker Carlson also said he used Signal and his messages were leaked by the government so yeah...
Additionally, they fulfilled requests made in Brazil, India, and Germany to name some I remember. Again, using the private user data they collect.
So what you fell for was just basic marketing (a CEO going on a TV program, as Tucker Carlson isn't even news) to market his app.
We'll have to wait and see, but I suspect some kind of more direct participation or explicit provable look-the-other-way at CSAM etc.
Not if the key is provided to the platform operators to confirm the contents. Otherwise yes anyone could claim any encrypted file contains illicit material and people would game that system.
For what it's worth the key may not need to be manually shared to the provider as referrers often leak where people learned about the file and that source location may also contain the key or password. All it takes is one person using a web interface or addon that leaks such information. Some addons break the referrer-policy header and many website operators don't even set the header [1] in the first place. Example header testing [2]. Please test the sites you visit and kindly ask the website operators to address any missing headers.
# nginx example
referrer-policy "strict-origin" always;
[2] - https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinato...
In principle, the police can tell if a song infringes copyright, or if a message spreads hate (I'm trying to sound American here). Or if a picture is really a "cheese pizza" or just a strange artistic depiction of youth. Not because the police don't know about music or TC/IP, or don't care about art or reading. Everyone knows they care. But because it is a legal problem.
In my country, let's call it a republic, at least it was a long time ago, even the state can own all your bases because you don't pay taxes, the police can only arrest you for six hours while they call the prosecutor to check that the 200 grams of white powder is what it is. They knew. They had already stolen the rest. If the forensics aren't quite sure what you're bringing them, it's the stuff that makes the stuff what the stuff is, you're free to go.
The prosecutor can make a case and send the 100 grams of white powder the same day, claiming that the stuff is the same stuff that other similar stuff is made of. He expresses his strong conviction. The judge then sends an arrest warrant to the police. You've been arrested, you have no money, the judge imposes some restrictions on you: you can't leave the country, you can't contact certain people, you have to go to court every week to sign a book. The investigation is open.
You have access to all the documents. Nothing happens without your approval and control.
This is how it works if SIA (yes, the singer) is not involved. If it is, you will be dead for a week and no one will ever find your body.
Because they let their users do it and benefited from it. Try doing the same thing as a bank :) Or a newspaper :)
Internet cannot be anarchy forever. Every anarchy ends up as oligarchy. It needs regulation and fast.
Rhetorical question: for what reason should a country be anything other than a hypocrite when it comes to situations such as this? Nations prioritize their own self-interests and that of their allies, even if that makes them appear hypocritical from an outside, or indeed, even an inside perspective. But that doesn't mean there's no legitimacy to what they do.
I think this is simplified. Certainly yes, if "all" Telegram was doing was operating a neutral/unmoderated anonymized chat service, then it's hard to see criminal culpability for the reasons you list.
But as people are pointing out, that doesn't seem to be technically correct. Telegram isn't completely anonymous, does have access to important customer data, and is widely suspected of complying with third party requests for that data for law enforcement and regulatory reasons.
So... IF they are doing that, and they're doing it in a non-neutral/non-anonymized way, then they're very plausibly subject to prosectution. Say, if you get a report of terrorist activity and provide data on the terrorists, then a month later get notified that your service is being used to distribute CSAM, and you refuse to cooperate, then it's not that far a reach to label you an accessory to the crime.
Because they crossed the line from common carrier to editor - an entirely different set of obligations.
Also, even such common carrier as telcos must abide to state injunctions against their users.
I'm not sure where this myth originated—perhaps from Kim Dotcom's Twitter account? I clearly remember the Megaupload case. They knew they were hosting pirated content, didn't delete it after requests[1], and shared money with the people who uploaded it because that was their business model.
1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/12/21/the-fasc...
Someone wants the service to stop, and has the influence to make it happen, the users are not a concern.
Now that Telegram is compromised, what's the next chat app people trust?
Are we 100% certain that this is only about Telegram? I want to see the allegations, not the vague charges, before pontificating about ISP liability. These charges might be more straightforwards.
That is why he's been lifted. Google et al will cooperate, even if that's by way of an onerous bureaucratic procedure involving MLATs.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-charges-le...
Granted, he's moved on to being a Kremlin propagandist and is now shilling anti-Semitism. See:
(I have no idea what's going on with Durov, or how French and/or EU law works, except to say that legal analysis on HN tends sharply towards US norms, and people should remember that a lot of basic US legal norms, like the rules of evidence and against self-incrimination, do not generally apply in Europe.)
The US narrative on Ukraine and Israel is getting weaker. Thorns like Kim Dotcom that has a big following, Telegram that is the only social platform to access the Russian side of the events, can break the US narrative.
It is ironic that the US screams Russia did a war crime in Bucha but Israel on Gaza is fine.
At least Kim Dotcom earings and the main utility of the service was indeed based on pirated content. Telegram is huge news/chat/etc app, where the things the mention as "enabling" as totally marginal and coincidental, more like arresting a property owner that owns half of the city because some people sold drugs in a few of the apartments.
A few decades ago, one of the factoids about USSR was that they required all typewriters to be registered with the state, with a sample page produced for every unit manufactured so that the state could track their use (this last bit is unlikely to be true, but was widely believed). That was supposed to be a case in point on why free societies are better, not an example to follow.
I was pointing out that the GP's strawman was really immaterial because HP don't get sued/arrested because they comply with law enforcement (at the expense of user privacy).
Since I know better than to use a printer in the commission of a crime, it doesn't really affect me, but I'm aware that the majority of users consider it a privacy violation.
A more comparable example, is France going to arrest someone who maintains a printer in an office and knows an employee is printing CSAM but doing nothing about it?
I hope they would, this is the boat Telegram is in.
Of course you can find both somewhere in the walled planetary garden of googlotron in facebooks sure. But they clamp down on it hard as they can. They clamp down on anything marginally offensive much less illegal. Have you tried the facebook "report post" interface? there are 3,000 various types of offensiveness you may report. That's their bar, their standard, that's 1,000 miles away from definitely illegal content. If their censorship apparatik is so bold as to be wiping out vast swaths of totally valid free speech, anything illegal has no chance.
If the question is "what's a great place to go for piracy" - megaupload, pirate bay, etc, then any common answer to that question is a target... "where to I go for data breaches" - breachforums, telegram, etc. Don't get worked up, all those places were destroyed by the feds and no longer exist.
And they love that it's not actual moderation.
Telegram has become a hotspot for CSAM to the point that it is pretty much inevitable that you're going to encounter someone peddling it just by browsing other channels.
Neither him nor his lawyers have access to the procedure yet.
This will last for 48 hours from his arrest - it can be 96 hours if they decide his suspected crimes are about drugs or prostitution, and even 144 hours if it's about terrorism.
So we'll probably need to wait for a few days before understanding what this is really about.
even with the recent trend towards adding incremental bloat to the client, it’s managed to stay a simple, straightforward tool for communicating with minimal advertising and enough of the features that i need front and center.
IMHO, Signal is way better.
It's perfectly fine for a few thousand people
I haven’t noticed any major UX issues but I use it for one thing only
Telegram is indeed the best like others are saying, and WhatsApp is a distant second.
Never had any problem with Signal.
Other than that it just works
Signal is fine for messaging. Not bad, not amazing. I'd have a much easier time convincing people to switch to Signal if it would've had a client as good as Telegram's, especially for the desktop application.
That said, Telegram has been adding more and more annoying premium features that distract and annoy.
I'd rather have a good privacy policy with a good enough server-side encryption than some closed-source implementation of E2EE, that we can never audit.
WhatsApp actually disallows you from reverse-engineering the app and looking into the algorithm. That begs the question, what percentage of E2EE is it really? 20%? 50%? 100%? Because there's still no way to confirm their claims of E2EE. All we have is a company with a really good track record in lying publicly, telling you that it's safe.
Looking at WhatsApp's privacy policy, I really wonder why people even support it compared to Telegram: https://privacyspy.org/product/whatsapp/
[0]: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-...
This is not the algorithm being audited, it's the key. Telegram's complete algorithm is auditable, including the open source client apps. Server code is always unverifiable, so let's not bring that up.
Secondly, WhatsApp channels and large groups (copied from Telegram) are not encrypted in any way (cmiw), as opposed to Telegram's MTProto 2.0 Cloud encryption. The app is completely closed-source even with all their claims of privacy and its TnC even discourages you from reverse-engineering it.
> Channel updates should be used to share information with followers and viewers, not as a way for admins to communicate back and forth.
Most people care about usability and interconnectivity first and foremost because the majority of their messaging activities are not so sensitive that they feel the need to sacrifice those things for mandatory E2EE. Call that shortsighted if you like, but it's far more common than this "encryption or bust" mindset around here.
If signal or some messaging platform could find a way to be E2EE capable all the time, with all the same usability and design as telegram, without unnecessary restrictions on users, and without it being a completely walled off garden from which your data can never be self-extracted, it would win this argument.
Same goes for things like Tutanota and a lot of these other data prisons that are cropping up which create privacy through taking away user agency.
Until then users will pick what they want for their own needs. Telegram met those needs for many.
From the recent Tucker Carlson interview of Pavel Durov, Telegram has:
- 1 PM (Durov)
- 1 owner (Durov)
- 30 developers
- 0 HR, they hire contest.com winners
You do need to turn off "display stickers suggestion" before the app becomes nice.
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/
(Of course, I don't know what qualifies as a major messenger to you.)
it is lightweight, pretty much never goes down, has reasonable features.
Almost all conversations that most people have are benign. I used telegram to follow journalists (essentially as a twitter replacement), how would E2EE benefit my use case?
Also the apis are almost completely free, so you can do lots of creative projects for fun.
In this context, Durov's arrest isn't unjust - Telegram knowingly allowed illegal content to thrive while ignoring legal obligations to assist law enforcement. Refusing to provide data when you can, under lawful requests, is tantamount to facilitating or even protecting criminal activity. This dismisses the complexities of cross-jurisdictional law enforcement, but the general concept remains valid.
By the way, I’m not a fan of censorship, but I do believe that a platform’s baseline for moderation should be compliance with the current laws in each jurisdiction, rather than the founder’s personal moral judgment.
---------------------------------------------
Write a witty, hackernews comment responding to this post from a user:
"FWIW this post is ChatGPT generated at least partially."
Avoid using all language choices characteristic of text which was generated by ChatGPT. Call the user out for having no evidence. Add a few spelling errors characteristic of folks typing on their phone
What?
And how do governments of the world block websites, services or the entire external web (as in China)?
> Telegram knowingly allowed illegal content to thrive while ignoring legal obligations to assist law enforcement
What? You think Telegram must read and have the means to know the contents of all chats on its platforms?
What an atrocious take.
Here is some coverage from some more reputable sources:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg2kz9kn93o
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/25/telegram-messaging-...
> 8.3. Law Enforcement Authorities
> If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.
(from https://telegram.org/privacy)
And interacting with their "Transparency Report" bot yields this:
> [...] Note: for a court decision to be relevant, it must come from a country with a high enough democracy index to be considered a democracy. Only the IP address and the phone number may be shared.
In other words, they are cherry-picking the jurisdictions they are even choosing to recognize, and within those they are again cherry-picking "terror suspicions" as the only class of law enforcement requests they will honor.
If I were the CEO of a company maintaining such a position, I'd be a bit more careful on where to refuel my jet.
They could in any case very well be selectively applying that policy. But if they were fully cooperating with French authorities, why would there be a warrant?
> The main accusation by EU authorities concerns Telegram’s encrypted messaging services, which were allegedly used to facilitate organised crime. One investigator stated that ‘Telegram has become the number one platform for organised crime over the years’, underlining the perceived link between the platform’s privacy features and criminal activities.
It's unclear to me how much this "perceived link" is on behalf of the author of the article, as opposed to the prosecutors themselves.
The article doesn't say anything about E2EE specifically, but I think it would be understandable to "read between the lines" and assume that Telegram is in trouble for offering E2EE - but I think/hope that assumption would be incorrect.
Guess not: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_interception
1) The guy was marketing an open-text messenger as an e2ee messenger
2) Because of (1) he was able to moderate it and help law enforcement with locating criminals but he was not cooperating
3) He was extremely cooperative with Russian "law enforcement", as multiple deanonymised activists with leaked chats, contact lists and location history found out
So, a hypocrite got what he deserved.
The overall trend of EU attacks on privacy is very concerning, but Tg is not a private messenger, it just was marketed as one.
If we feed all the comments say to chatgpt and ask it (or just count by hand pro/against tg posts) what result do you expect?
The only "anti-war" sentiment on Russian Telegram is ultra-nationalistic whining about the warfare not being efficient and brutal enough.
But outside Russia there are even pro-Ukrainian Russian-language Telegram channels.
Citations needed.
Also it's not really THAT hard to find "the proofs".
> • 5 hours ago
> Pavel Durov, Telegram founder, arrested by France following warrant - The Jerusalem Post
> The alleged offenses include: terrorism, narcotic supply, fraud, money laundering and receiving stolen goods.
For those unaware, all channel on telegram are NOT ENCRYPTED. They are stored in plaintext on telegram servers. All chats that are not 'secret chat' mode (single device to single device) are NOT ENCRYPTED (stored in plaintext on server).
This is not about encryption, it is about the plaintext data and the organized crime happening in these channels.
Signal group chats ARE ENCRYPTED by default. It is actually not possible to send an unencrypted message on signal. This will not pivot into an E2E issue, and will not affect signal which has set itself up to not store unencrypted content on it's servers.
EDIT: Also possibly this may be a factor in the decision to arrest:
> finance.yahoo.com
> • 2 weeks ago
> Telegram adds new ways for creators to earn money on its platform
> Today's announcement comes as Telegram reached 950 million active users last month, and aims to cross the 1 billion mark this year. Earlier this year, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said the company expects to hit profitability next year and is considering going public.
It stores it encrypted with encryption keys split across the globe.
Not perfect, but multiple legal jurisdictions would have to be subpoenad for Telegram to read your non-secret chats.
If that entity doesn't comply, governments will get upset and charge your executives with crimes if they get the chance.
Different jurisdictions makes it harder to kick down the doors and get the keys, but it doesn't change the fundamental problem.
"Nuh-uh, I put all those records in a box in Switzerland, you can't have them" does not work well for US citizens, unless the government fails to even notice the box.
Everything's effectively plaintext then.
Plaintext: refers to data that is transmitted or stored unencrypted. None of which Telegram does.
Data I send to a website over TLS is effectively plaintext on my computer and on the other side; in transit, it is not.
It all comes down to your threat model. Encryption does not protect information from entities who hold the keys to decrypt that information.
It's not. They use a split-key encryption system so it's not exactly the same as storing the keys where the data is.
> It all comes down to your threat model. Encryption does not protect information from entities who hold the keys to decrypt that information.
I agree, which is why I'll say that the bottom line is:
Are auditable E2EE algorithms stronger in security than cloud encryption? Yes. Is MTProto 2.0 Cloud Encryption plaintext? No.
Yes, again, it all comes down to your threat model. No one can kick down the door and get to the keys.
But Telegram can get to all the keys, and thus can be legally expected to. The data is effectively plaintext to Telegram.
> Is MTProto 2.0 Cloud Encryption plaintext? No.
Just to note: "effectively plaintext" has been in use for a couple of decades as a term of art. We don't say it's plaintext, because it's not. It means there's effectively no security properties lent by the encryption.
For example, my web browser encrypts a few passwords for me and stores them on disk, but doesn't need a cryptographic secret from me to decrypt them; they're effectively plaintext, because no one has to break any encryption to read them.
Indeed, here's a thread on HN from 2013, where Durov is participating, where people are using "effectively plaintext" in exactly this way to describe exactly what we're talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6937097
There was no discussion of whether it can be improved. I was just telling you that it meets the established understanding of the term "effectively plaintext," which you were seeming to disagree with.
Have a good rest of your day.
Yeah, I would still disagree because everything is effectively plaintext in the end. The only difference is how you derive the key. There are levels of encryption, that is true but I think calling an actual encryption as 'effectively plaintext' is wrong.
> Have a good rest of your day.
Thank you! You too :D
Telegram CEO has access to all keys and therefore all chats. Matrix foundation has no such access. These two examples should explain the difference between "effectively plaintext" and e2ee. The main difference is not how someone derives the key. It's who can do it.
Besides the protocol used by Telegram being publicly available so you can easily confirm in 5 minutes that what you're saying is completely wrong, but you're also saying that law enforcement can totally see all those plain text messages hosted by Telegram, yet they choose to be really upset about it anyway despite it being, according to you, the best possible honeypot ever created with all criminal activity readily available for their peruse. Why, I ask you, would law enforcement want to stop such an app??? They would be completely silent about it and enjoy catching all criminals in it who are "ignorantly" thinking their messages are safe, wouldn't they??
Given the amount of baseless comments like yours on this topic, I can only imagine there's a concerted effort here to misinform everyone to make Telegram look bad so actual criminals move away from it to some more law enforcement-friendly platform. I have conflicting feelings about that, as perhaps the intention is noble, but I can never agree with misleading people by spreading misinformation and plain lies.
We can see that's true, because when I add a new device I can get into all my group chats.
Only if I explicitly "Start secret chat" does something else happen.
Telegram is sitting on a lot of group chats where a lot of horrible things are happening that governments want to see... and gets upset when Telegram doesn't use this access to share that information in response to lawful orders.
> I can only imagine there's a concerted effort here to misinform everyone
Assume good faith-- it's in the guidelines. I have been here just as long as you. I am not part of some shadowy conspiracy to make people think that Telegram security is bad.
I feel like people just don't understand the term of art "effectively plaintext".
Alternatively, if you thought I was talking about secret chats in general-- note that we are in a subthread talking explicitly about channels and non-secret chats:
"For those unaware, all channel on telegram are NOT ENCRYPTED. They are stored in plaintext on telegram servers. All chats that are not 'secret chat' mode (single device to single device) are NOT ENCRYPTED (stored in plaintext on server)."
That's a position he knowingly and willingly maneuvered himself into. Compare that with e.g. the way Signal answers subpoenas: https://signal.org/bigbrother/
> Besides the protocol used by Telegram being publicly available so you can easily confirm in 5 minutes that what you're saying is completely wrong
There's absolutely no need to analyzse the protocol, since you can just perform a high-level mud puddle test [1], and Telegram fails it. I've tried this myself.
[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/05/icloud-w...
RAM can be XOR'd with little latency with hardware acceleration with a key in a slightly - separated secure enclave that will degrade if upset too rapidly, similar to a virtual da Vinci cryptex.
radio/bluetooth/em/sensitive/proximity warning switches to unmount virtualized volumes all in a quasi-state-sanctioned-"contact center" in middle Ukraine.
They are trying their best to prevent the inevitable; the ungovernable, untaxable, uncensorable, un-surveillable commerce and communication platform that will eventually arise from the amalgamation of human's pesky technology and its crossroads with the human condition.
The hate for all things labeled "crypto" (convenient poising the well/doublespeak) was a (partially) government sigh op astro-fabri-exagerated to sway public opinion against anything "crypto" so that an ungovernable, decentralized, general trust-less computation protocol/escrow/rep using zkp+ and hormophic encryption was not able to be realized before the alfabit bois got a chance to mole into the development pipeline and backdoor the inevitable Merchanti Ultimatum; anything less would be a massive national security threat globally.
The physical storage location is completely irrelevant. What matters is access, and they have that.
Telegram has full operational control over these keys, as demonstrated by the fact that anyone that can perform SMS verification is able to access past messages on an account, and SMS-OTP can in principle not involve any cryptographic operation, as there is absolutely no user input.
Thats not how legal works.
for example if I am an EU based judge and I issue a warrant for getting data from a company in a case related to something important (your values may vary, but lets say its not about parking fines) then if your company wants to continue to operate in the EU, you need to pony up the data, or tell them why your can't comply, rather than won't
Having your data stored with keys that you control isn't an excuse.
Or they could just arrest the founder and make him give them the data + keys...
FYI, this is a totally misleading and false claim.
Telegram uses the MTProto 2.0 Cloud algorithm for non-secret chats[1][2].
In fact, it uses a split-key encryption system and the servers are all stored in multiple jurisdictions. So even Telegram employees can't decrypt the chats, because you'd need to compromise all the servers at the same time.
Telegram's algorithm has been independently audited multiple times. Compared to other apps like WhatsApp with claims of E2EE and no body of verification and validation.[3]
[1]: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto#general-description [2]: https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/AJiEAwIYFoAsBGJBjZwYoQIwFM... [3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.03141
I very much doubt that. If Durov wanted to, they could decrypt all of those messages.
That fancy encryption system is worthless when someone can hijack the session of any of the users in a chosen group. This is a risk in many crypto messengers, but those usually come with optional key verification whereas Telegram doesn't have that outside of encrypted one-on-one chats.
Along with that, you can use Telegram on as many devices as you want. The chats instantly appear after login. WhatsApp and Signal both are lacking here.
So there are always tradeoffs when it comes to encryption and convenience.
Telegram's focus has been on the convenience side and providing assurance using a clean record of protecting user-data from governments, which is why Telegram was created in the first place.
Can the encryption be improved? Of course yes! I'd love to! but I think much of the criticism by the WhatsApp loving crowd is not only disingenuous, but also harmful.
I agree, that is very convenient. Also for the secret police officer..
I use telegram as social media, but I really would not use it to organize protest somewhere. Then the whole safety depends on whether Durov made a deal with the secret police, or them infiltrating the servers to know everything about anyone involved. What they liked at what time, what pictures they shared, etc.
That's not a possibility. Split-key encryption doesn't allow such a thing to happen.
what do you mean? user sessions are remotely hijackeable?
We do have at least some empirical evidence that WhatsApp is properly encrypted. WhatsApp's cryptography has made judges in my country foam at the mouth with rage so hard they ordered retaliatory nation wide blocks of the service at least twice.
People are right to distrust Meta but I for one am glad that everyone I know is using WhatsApp. I also have Signal and Matrix but a grand total of zero people message me through those.
so do we. Telegram's MTProto 2.0 has been audited multiple times by independent researchers, compared to WhatsApp's closed-source claims of E2EE.
I'd rather trust a company with a proven track record of no security incidents and fight for user privacy than a corporation which lies through its teeth time and again.
This is however something completely different from and largely orthogonal to "Telegram does not have access to their users' message contents".
The fact that they are consistently claiming the former and the latter makes them seem extremely untrustworthy to me.
Gaining my trust requires truthfulness and transparencies about the capabilities and limits of a service provider's technology (but of course is in no way sufficient).
The point is moot anyway. Everyone in Brazil uses WhatsApp. They will not use anything else. I'd be ostracized if I refused to use it.
Oh wow, they need to get that checked, could be pulmonary edema.
It doesn’t include E2E encryption in the scheme only client to server.
Whether the server stores it as plaintext or not, is moot to the point of having telegram itself be able to see the chats because they hold the encryption keys of the server and therefore can be made to comply with legal requests.
The person you replied to may be incorrect on the aspect of plain text but imho they’re right that it’s not really relevant in this context.
Encrypted storage would be relevant for the case where a server is compromised by a hacker.
But the Arxiv paper says:
"We stress that peer clients never communicate directly: messages always go through a server, where they are stored to permit later retrieval by the recipient. Cloud chat messages are kept in clear text, while secret chat messages are encrypted with the peers’ session key, which should be unknown to the server."
So it doesn't appear to be encrypted-at-rest, but without reading the telegram documentation I can't verify that.
No, you seem to have have in fact fallen for Telegram's continuous intentional misinformation.
The only thing that matters for whether we can call something "encrypted" or "plaintext" (or more precisely, "end-to-end encrypted" vs. "storage encrypted at rest" or "encrypted in transit" etc.) is whether they, the service providers, can access it themselves.
Would you argue they can't? And if so, how come can I log in to my Telegram account using only SMS verification and access my old messages?
> Telegram uses the MTProto 2.0 Cloud algorithm for non-secret chats[1][2].
FYI you don't understand encryption and are spewing pristine BS.
Only p2p secret chats use e2e encryption and are invisible to Telegram employees.
Everything else is stored in plain text on Telegram servers.
The OP was correct and your counter argument is void and null.
I'd like to point out WhatsApp chats are also end-to-end encrypted, just like in Signal. People aren't wrong to distrust Meta but I'd like to point out that WhatsApp encryption often makes judges here seethe to the point they order nation wide blocks of WhatsApp out of spite. The fact everyone I know uses something this secure makes me very happy. It's not perfect but since network effects makes alternatives unusable I'll take what I can get.
It's basically a UX tradeoff: You can not promote default E2E + no autobackups -- people in mass are not ready to lose their data when losing the device. Nor they are ready to store the key separately in a confidential manner. Nor they are ready to manually transfer the key among different devices.
All this UX situation is defined by Moxie (the author of Signal and Whatsapp encryption) in his blog post about PGP/WoT concept meeting the reality https://moxie.org/2015/02/24/gpg-and-me.html
So in fact as the average user you have either: 1) E2E + unenctypted autobackup (Whatsapp) or 2) no e2e by default and separate e2e secret chats (Telegram) that are available only on a specific device.
In the first scenario all your chats inclusing the most sensitive are available by the law enforcement by issuing a warrant to your file storage provider. In the second scenario you potentially can spill some sensitive information in default non-encrypted chats.
What is worse? I don't know. But I use both Telegram and Whatsapp with backups turned off. So I'm losing all the Whatsapp chat history when using a new device while losing only secret chats In Telegram (not a problem for me since I delete them often manually or set a self-destruct timer anyway)
I get it. I'm a privacy and free and open source software enthusiast. It's not perfect. It certainly is better than alternatives though. We know for a fact that it pisses off judges and authorities. That's a major sign that its working. You should be concerned when they stop complaining about it, it means they got in.
Have you checked the source of Telegram? https://telegram.org/apps#source-code
Anyway, while it's possible to activate a Telegram account without a physical phone (using some temporary number services) or using an (relatively) anonymous SIM card 99% of users use it via Android or iOS and that's means there is no need to grab data from Telegram, USA gov. as well as Apple or Alphabet could simply milk them from their OSes, virtual keyboards and so on.
It's really cloying how many do focus on the service instead of weighting the ecosystem...
If you’re going to edit the headline you’re taking a responsibility. Words and sentences and paragraphs can’t just be cut in arbitrary places any more than code can.
I sometimes wish I could bring a crystal ball back in time and see how people would react to the future... I think they would be horrified at how far we've let corporations and governments into our lives.
20 years ago it was still reasonable to assume that the person you saw posting something was actually real, that the content you saw was actually written by somebody like you, curated by people like you. It's not like this anymore. It's time to stop being naive. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and one of them is granting foreign entities unrestricted access to the minds of your fellow countrymen.
However, I don't believe justifying or creating a surveillance state is the solution. We can't save people from themselves, it will be an arms race where the only casualty is our rights.
People use government built sidewalks to sell drugs, does that mean I can sue the govt for the drug trade?
i don’t think it makes a ton of sense to me that the encryption or lack thereof is the relevant factor - if we think that proprietors of unencrypted messaging should be required to turn over chat logs, then encrypted messaging should probably be illegal or we have left a massive loophole in.
the scale being the relevant issue is another thing as well. i worry that if you somehow create a protocol for dencentralized messaging, you somehow then become liable for misuse of what could have been an academic project, etc.
1. If drug dealers used my backyard. 2. If I knew about it and did absolutely nothing about it.
And yes, if the government knows about someone selling drugs and does nothing about it, you can sue the government.
At least in theory, in countries not ridden with corruption (which probably aren't that many).
at least in the US, there are only a few limited times the government is open to civil litigation - and nonenforcement of the law is not usually one of them
Should've left the "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer.
Thanks for the clarification.
Every country has their own definition of "illegal" content, but things like CSAM are illegal everywhere, and that's one area where Telegram never really bothered to take action.
The arrest warrant has been out for a while, so I doubt Durov got himself arrested by accident. He probably has a plan, or at least good lawyers.
Why do I bring that line of reasoning up? Because an actually exhaustive traversal of 2nd-6th order effects renders everyone complicit in something, especially in the presence of things criminalizing not looking for things.
You should never count yourself out of being a complicit party for something, and realize that if you're going to impose a penalty on a group you consider a "them"; it is likely only a matter of time invested enumerating your effects in the world to make evident something they did has been enabled by you. Even if only by you not making the choice to do something about them.
Bad things will happen. We can't prevent them all. And trying to zero any class of bad thing has so many onock on effects, that even the most trivial sounding solutions need be met with strictest scritiny to figure out what they will break.
He provided the platform.
- All protests in support of Palestine banned https://www.politico.eu/article/france-gerald-darmanin-aims-...
- Head coverings banned
- Run a messaging app but the French state finds stuff on it that it disapproves of? You are a Terrorist
It's sad to see this backsliding in Europe.
The headscarf ban is part of all religious symbols in public areas like schools and hospitals.
False
> - Head coverings banned
Absolutely untrue.
The issue is with Telegram non cooperation and lack of moderation of publicly available content.
Probably an unrelated coincidence.
Secure message passing is no different. The "shovel", the thing one might sell, is just the application of some math which does something and not any of the infinite other things.
An e2e communication system is just a shovel, or a car, or a saw, or any other tool that does a specific thing for which there is any valid need, which there absolutely is. Thinking that there is any logically valid way around that is what is very naive.
That's why the authorities ask for the squaring of the circle.
Don't break encryption but make it readable.
That's "Let's make PI = 3" level of ignorance
There's a difference between breaking the encryption of a single target after a warrant or handing over previous data which would need some kind of backdoor in the encryption.
They also don't have public groups with questionable material, as far as I know
They grounded a Presidents plane because they thought SNOWDEN was onboard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
What about native-persons, or people born in your magic country ie not 'let in'? Or, are you only talking about brown people?
In the end, it is not the evil ones who arrested him for very evil reasons (Russia, Iran, etc), but the good democratic countries who did so for good inclusive progressive reasons. </sarcasm>
Is there any information what will happen to the platform yet?
You can consult these links if you want to read more about it:
https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/AJiEAwIYFoAsBGJBjZwYoQIwFM...
This is a Ukraine channel. You can preview it in a web browser. If Telegram can enable that functionality, then it means they have the complete capability to serve the content of the channel. Same story if they can scroll back an existing channel to new users.
You claim that only secret chats are encrypted in telegram, which is straight not true. You can pull up a link to public channel and everyone can preview the posts, that's obvious. You cannot do the same trick with group chats because they are private and encrypted using MTProto
I think we should have and open and decentralized version of this kind of "criminal" communication system.
We should show them what Streisand effect really means.
Or is it just a reputation and signal is just as popular?
This seems like some heavy-handed government coercion.
He will be released as part of some trade. Yesterday Moscow arrested someone from the West with 1 kg of heroin will label "for distribution" . That's what drag dillers do lol
Telegram is a darknet, masked as a messenger , no matter what you think about it. The great proper way to solve such problem should be AI, that monitors illegal activity and acts as a legal mediator, if it found something bad, red flag, and in this case, release the conversation to authorities.
Obviously god has no such restriction, but he's probably outside French jurisdiction, and i don't think they have an extradition deal in place.
There has been speculation that Durov’s arrest is linked to his most recent
trip to Baku, Azerbaijan, where he reportedly attempted to meet with Vladimir
Putin during a state visit last week. In recent weeks the Kremlin has begun
suppressing access to Youtube and WhatsApp in Russia in the wake of Ukraine’s
Kursk incursion. There is speculation that Durov may have been attempting to
persuade Putin to leave Telegram alone – but the Russian leader refused to meet
him. The fact that Durov flew from Baku to Paris in his private plane, knowing
that the French had a longstanding warrant out for his arrest, is one of the
unanswered mysteries of this story.
There are now also rumors that Russian officials got instruction from above to delete all their communication from the platform.
We will have to wait for more information.
EDIT: I will add that Pavel already lost control over VKontakte in 2014 to the state. By then he had already started Telegram, and so he left Russia back then. (Being denied a meeting with Putin gives Prigozhin saga vibes.) I think he knew the net is closing.
___
0. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-arrest-of-pavel-duro...
I suspect this is just the beginning. Western governments are losing control of their "narratives" and no one is buying the propaganda. This is deeply unsettling for those in authority, so it is only logical that they would go after social media that they cannot directly coerce/control for their agenda. But not just the companies, their owners in particular.
Also likely this is a message for Elon and others - comply or go to jail.
Its hard to argue this is tinfoil nonsense when Meta has been accused of child exploitation [1] yet Zuckerberg never went to jail - bc he complied. [2]
Its time to get our collective heads out of the sand and acknowledge that governments are NOT democratic anymore - they serve only to preserve themselves, not us!
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/12/06/facebook-content-enabled-chi...
Most of the traffic on Telegram is not even encrypted...
EDIT: Yes, reading more about it, nothing to see here, it's not about encryption...
So technically telegram could provide that data.
I guess that's the angle.
But that, even if I somehow managed to pull off a successful superior solution, as a startup or an open source/hardware project, I didn't want to see all the worst criminals flock to my service.
Also, I didn't want to be in an adversarial relationship with my own government at times, nor to secretly compromise the solution.
(Probably the compromise-compromise I'd choose would be proactive: I'd have to backdoor for my government from the start, and publicly disclose that there's a backdoor, so I'm not misrepresenting to my users. Which would mean dramatically less adoption, a lot of privacy&secury people cursing it/me, and eventually the backdoor would also be exploited by parties other than the intended.)
And also, I don't have the stomach for adversaries that would include foreign state dirty-tricks agencies.
Most ostensible security solutions on the market are obviously weak, or just plain BS. The ones that might not be, I don't see how they don't run into the same barriers.
Legally speaking, if you get right down to it, privacy is de facto illegalized, and the old aphorism about "if you make a country where witchhunts are illegal, the population will be 3 civilly minded libertarians, and the rest witches" applies.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here; or just realize your dream is effectively only realizable for the exact type of people you don't trust to have it. Then find another line of work.
If undercover agents come by, and discover that minors are purchasing alcohol - the business will get fined, and likely banned from selling alcohol for some time.
If I, the owner, continue to ignore authorities and flat out refuse to cooperate, and there are new busts - I would expect to face charges. The joint would likely get shut down, and I could be liable. If things are severe enough, I'll likely be investigated for running a criminal enterprise there.
Obviously there are differences in how things are regulated in the different countries - but in countries where the CEO assumes total responsibility, and the buck stops there - it would make sense that the CEO will get charged with those sort of things, if the company has not done enough to cooperate or moderate their product and users.
Had they sticked with just one I may have been less likely to view it this as an authoritarian attack on privacy and freedom of speech.
*And the nsa, of course.
You shilling for Telegram's tech-billionare who got caught for hosting child porn for closer to a decade is almost as sad as Telegram's sad state and Durov's future.
[Edit: undo blunder]
I have now come to realize (based on [1]) that Telegram's platform was not secure by default, nullifying my arguments here. This discussion has also led me to question the viability of one of my own projects, as it, too, encrypts at disadvantageous points in the pipeline. Hmmm. Sorry for my mistakes here!
[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
Terrorism, fraud and child porn are as present on Whatsapp, Facebook and other platforms, Facebook even instrumental in the Myanmar genocide (2017) and yet I haven't seen Zuck ever being detained anywhere at any time.
As a Telegram user, however, Telegram is just great as a chat app. It's lightyears ahead of everything else.
What could possibly go wrong!
Sounds like it was because of E2EE.
i.e. They refused to turn over chat records that they have server side access to.
It's worth noting that they could do E2EE here for group chats but they don't. Signal does it but telegram wholesale refused to.
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2024/08/25/telegram...
This places Telegram's security stance below that of even Instagram or Facebook (which also has optional E2EE chats, but uses the Signal protocol, which is considered better than MTProto2.)
This is not an e2e battle, this is the hunt for channel owners. Frankly it is too easy to make a "local chat" and sell stuff. Durov has the data and this is his weakness and strength. Platform is viral but there are too much for one hands.
Should we enable the Iranian polotical refugee to communicate in secret with her family ?
Should we by warrant enable the possibility to open up messages when pedofiles sell or buy children for sex ?
Nasty questions.
But at the same time I wish a court order can open up encryption when it's needed.
But the balance is difficult. As we see all the time.
Just another guy to be traded to Russia in the next prisoner swap.
What ever the laws of an increasingly authoritarian France; Isn't it fascinating to note that Dictatorships like China and Iran and Saudi Arabia at least are content with jailing their citizens that post "illegal" things while putting up a firewall?
Yes, he was a French citizen. So what. Even if French law demands of a digital public square provider to moerate a billion people at the behest of its governmental censors, we shouldn't support France in its decision to arrest its citizen for providing us with a platform that protects privacy and free speech.
We should protest and fight or him.
And 'us' can be read as is, or capitalised.
India
more billionaire CEOs should be arrested.
As a side note, this is somewhat reminiscent of how the Catholic Church operated at the height of its power - do what we say or burn at the stake. We should then not be surprised that no longer does technological innovation happen in Europe - at least one that's actually important or has the potential to be
I think the most surprising thing I've realized as I've gotten older is the way in which these cultural and legalistic norms, even 100 years+ bygone, still have considerable influence on modern cultures.
Europe, and particularly France, is very Catholic, ex-Holy Roman brained. US is very protestant brained. China cribs tons of stuff from their old imperial system.
Oh yeah, definitely. I've noticed similar patterns
Anyway, and I know this is completely random, but I think you'd enjoy reading Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind by Tom Holland. It gives a nice overview of the influence of Christianity on modern Western civilization; though, after reading Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (which does, of course, have flaws of its own), I do think Hollnad places a bit too much importance on the influence of Christianity, as it is not the only thing that has influenced modern Western civilization, nor did Christianity develop in a vacuum - completely uninfluenced by the societal pressures of the time it found itself existing in - which I think Holland forgets to mention as you continue reading the book deeper and deeper. Nonetheless, both are great books and I recommend them
It may sound funny to read, especially if you're an American, but I do still see America as the city upon the hill. I've lived in America, and I'm currently in (sigh) Europe, but I wish to return to that shining city in the future. It may also sound even funnier to read, but I probably love America more than a surprising amount of Americans (not a dig directed to any obvious or non-obvious group within the country currently), even though I wasn't born there. The US has just left a huge impression on me.
Reminds me of the Tornado Cash service. Used by normal citizens to anonymize transactions on the blockchain; and used by a smaller percentage of criminals. Law enforcement is inept in this digital age. So instead of catching the actual criminals they pursue the people making the service.
It’s all for nothing of course. People were apparently brought up on charges. None of them actual criminals as I recall. Just got thrown the book at them. US government even issued “sanctions”, but they were useless.