232 replies
21h9m
Not clear right now if France thinks he was actively complicit with the four horsemen listed, or if just the act of running Telegram makes him complicit in their eyes, or something in the middle, e.g. they asked for help and Telegram turned them down.
This will be an interesting case to watch -- I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort -- but generally my understanding is that harassment on border entry has been the order of the day, rather than arrests.
But that's what exactly they want no? EU is literally implementing a regulation that will allow to "circumvent end-to-end encryption to address child sexual abuse material". I believe it failed to pass recently, but they will try again - and nothing stops countries to implement it independently. I think France is the one who was pushing for that in the first place.
You might be surprised to learn who's doing the pushing:
https://www.wired.com/story/europes-moral-crusader-lays-down...
https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...
I'm not. The Swedish government is a lot like California's: it's a lot less progressive than it pretends to be.
It's not progressive. It's protectionist. The people they're protecting carry a lot of guilt, and so really like the "progressive" label, it's puts a really nice spin on their particular version of graft and corruption.
Yep. If the Swedish government really cared about children, they would do something to stop the massive underage gang violence problem the country has. 12 year olds being used as hitmen for drug gangs is not normal, yet that's the reality.
gangs of 12 year old roaming the swedish streets? you sure, it's not monty python playing in your head?
Ignorance is bliss. It literally takes 4 sec to perform a search and find plenty of such cases - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PXZxaKMl9Y (Sky News Investigates: Sweden's deadly gang war)
"How has a peaceful European country ended up the gun murder capital of the EU?" "Things got so bad that the government called in the army to help the police. And there's a new deadly trend emerging in this battle. Gang members as young as 14 are increasingly using explosives to target rivals as they fight over drug turfs. "
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/SWE/swe...
things tend to be relative, hence statistics are a thing. The gun murder capital of Europe without some hard data as to what that means sounds a bit like the radiation poisoning center of Antarctica, gang members as young as 14 can definitely be increasingly doing things if before they started increasing there were zero gang members below 14 using explosives etc.
Another problem is just taking what the police say as being "true", for example the police say there are 62000 people in Stockholm (a city of slightly over 920000) "linked" to criminal gangs - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-has-around-62000... this article uses the word linked twice, in the title linked to criminal gangs, and later in the article "the authorities have struggled for years to contain violence linked to organised crime." I wonder if they have 62000 people who are violent in their linkage, somehow I doubt it but this seems to be the impression.
Hey, I bet there is a problem, how big of a problem, probably not as big as these news stories imply. Why not? Well because if I had a really big nasty problem I wouldn't just imply it, I would lay it out, plenty of engagement to go around, but if my engagement could benefit from exaggerating the problem then I will imply instead of stating plainly.
At any rate more than 6% of the population of Stockholm is currently not involved in a violent gang war which one might infer from the reportage.
I love responses like this. Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.
If you are not an inmate I will assume that you are a free person living in a western society. Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm, lets just say for the statistics you are going to live in a slightly not so friendly neighbourhood where the lying police said that it is an area populated with predominantly 14 years old gang members, now since police by your own words cannot be trusted we will assume that their information is not correct and the area is perfectly fine and safe.
Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur? Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.
Now you can choose to deny reality and look away, but the good thing about reality is, that it is just like gravity it just hits you sometimes.
I don't know if your PM have to call in the army to help with gang related crimes the situation seem pretty bad to me, again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.
I know we're supposed to think everybody is being honest here, but I don't think you do love responses like this.
right, to get the rates of deaths by violence, rates of death by gang related violence, compare that to other parts of the world with gang related violence etc. etc. I mean I agree, everybody knows how to do statistics!
I stand corrected, not everybody knows how to do statistics.
but anyway that is not how statistics works.
You know the answer as to whether I am willing to move to a part of Stockholm the police identify as high crime from "a western society" based on a hacker news argument with someone who evidently doesn't know how statistics work?
Amazing!!
If "with just 5% probability to get executed" then the answer to "how likely is this event to occur?" is 5%. However as this is "by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times" then that would mean 5 out of every 100 times somebody walks home they get executed.
Given the earlier number of people in the article linked with crime was 62000, and assuming that everybody walks home at least once per day and 5% of people walking home get executed by 14 year olds it follows that in your world 3100 people per day are getting executed by 14 year olds in Stockholm, that seems a lot. I mean in 30 days that would be more than the number of people linked with crime!
If that were true I don't think the EU would just be proposing to help inmates in their prisons but might be sending peace keeping forces in to help.
obviously there are a number of points where I've fudged the numbers here, as I don't care much, for example with 3100 being killed the 5% of 62000 would be decreasing as it would no longer be 62000 - but I will leave that to other people to figure out.
also since only 62 people were violently shot in Sweden during the year I guess that also indicates this 5% thing just doesn't add up, unless these people are getting violently exploded I guess.
These kind of responses (yours, zx10rse) are the absolute worst appeals to anecdote and bias I can think of. Someone actually comes along with a logical argument so you just give up and say "yeah well uhhh I'd like to see you try". Sad.
actually in that article from Reuters it says there were 62 deadly shootings in Sweden in the year.
Which is hilarious because it also says there are 62000 gang linked people in Stockholm.
One thing you are always told to watch out for is big round numbers in stats, because it is pretty unlikely it is just 62000 and not 62119 or something (not a big stats guy, just something I've read)
At any rate the article says 62000 linked to gangs, and 62 killings (pretty weird that). So a 0.1% violence among the linked to gangs people (if all the murders were linked to gangs), but out of the full pop of Sweden 10,490,000 this is a 0.000591% rate of murder, the U.S as a whole has 0.0075 murder rate right now.
Zoom in on parts of the U.S you get a much higher murder rate - https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-...
like I said everything is relative, and Sweden does not have as big a problem as the reporting lets on.
I am curious, is the rise of violent crime somehow linked with migration from Asia and Africa or it is a completely unrelated issue and most of the criminals come from families who have lived in Sweden for many generations?
It's largely second generation immigrants (yes, mostly from Africa and the Middle East, since that's where most immigration - in the shape of refugees - comes from).
And take it from someone who actually lives in the area (as opposed to HN speculators): YES it has gotten significantly worse over the last five years (having already been bad for decades), and YES 14 year old hitmen with explosives and automatic weapons are now an actual thing, not just a couple of incidents.
The politics of this is so inflamed, which makes it harder to discuss, much less solve the problems. I am not against immigration per se, from any given country. But right now, it is obviously causing major problems that need to be handled with extreme prejudice.
Sweden is building now new prison for underage and lacks thousands of seats for inmates. Other countries are talking about renting their spare capacities to them.
"Sky News Investigates" is synonomous with Murdoch Press grossly exaggerates small issues to be world threatening edge of the seat click baiting prequels to the coming apocolypse.
At least in Australia and in the UK. Maybe they're a moderate and balanced presenter of truth on the ground in Sweden.
Seems unlikely.
I'm fully aware this reads as "attacking the source" but there's no rabid attack intended here just a frank pragmatic assessment of what "Sky News Investigates" actually means.
Open a newspaper when you find the time. Even government aligned mainstream media is reporting on it.
You talk as if this is a problem that is easily solved. Of course government wish this could he solved.
A tip is that whenever you reach a ludicrous conclusion "they do nothing to stop underage violence", it's probably your analysis that is ludicrous and not the object being analyzed.
Well they will send brochures to schools now. That will fix it for sure I guess...
Durov 2024 interview, https://www.happyscribe.com/public/the-tucker-carlson-podcas... [text] & https://tuckercarlson.com/the-tucker-carlson-interview-pavel... [video]
> Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. It's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is using Telegram. For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides. We don't become prejudiced in this way.
Durov is full of shit.
He'd have you believe that all messages are welcome on Telegram, that no material is censored, that it's all about free expression, that they're too small to provide moderation.
But when an account is flagged for spam, Telegram rapidly responds and restricts or kills the account. So they can and do moderate content.
It's just that accounts can get flagged for CSAM hundreds of times and Telegram takes no action.
They're making a choice to provide a platform for this material. That's against the law and prison time is absolutely justified.
In cases where there is public evidence of illegal activity, where incidents have been reported to law enforcement, does Telegram provide LE with account information (e.g. phone number) for further investigation? Similar to Apple transparency reports? https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/
https://restoreprivacy.com/telegram-sharing-user-data/
> 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.
Signal and Telegram were publicly sparring in May 2024, 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.”
sounds logical and can probably be checked!
sounds logical and being a big company I suppose true.
sounds probable, meaning they got funding from some NSA project.
this sounds a bit crazy!
evidently I'm getting downvoted because people have some opinions about these statements but they're also not able to enunciate what those opinions are even though they must be at odds with my opinions. The classiest type of HN downvoter there is!
"other offences" probably means copyright issues?
In my experience it's the channel's admins who respond, not Telegram's.
If that's the case then CSAM not getting actioned is probably just channel admins allowing content that they approve of.
In my experience, CSAM accounts get flagged many times, channel owners remove the account from their channels, but the account continues to post the material elsewhere.
Spam is very easily defined and identified, no need to read anything or to look at any images. If you message someone for the first time, they can click a report button and bam it's automatic weekly spam ban for you. Do it three times, forever ban.
The major state owned Kazakhstan telecom company did peering with Telegram, they say now it is 10ms is better, but the real reason might be to have means to cutoff Telegram if anything wrong happens
Ylva Johansson, a "former" Communist who joined the social democratic party when that turned out to be a more sure-fire way to gain power is decidedly not the Swedish government. It it people like her and the policies they implemented which pushed the "Sweden Democrats" (a somewhat conservative nationalist party, their program resembles they of the social democratic party in the 1950's-1960's) to become the second-biggest party in the country.
And yet the current Swedish government appointed her again to the European Commission.
No wonder it's Swedish, a country with zero privacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
To be clear, the legislation in France and in the EU that is most likely behind this arrest is that companies have to at least try to do some moderation. There is an understanding that not everything can be moderated (obviously, the entire Internet would be banned otherwise) but there has to be a genuine attempt.
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.
Telegram is not a behemoth like Facebook so doesn't have their resources to moderate everything. Even Facebook isn't particularly good at it. They mostly rely on software which often produces false positives.
This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.
lately when i see arguments like yours one thing keeps popping into my head. i’m not sure how i feel about the following yet but it’s been on my mind a bit for the past couple of years:
if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property? if they make such an excuse, it would seem to me they’re either too irresponsible or just plain incompetent.
again, i’m not sure how i feel about the implications of this, but the whole “we just don’t have the resources” feels like a cowards excuse rather than reality—particularly as someone already pointed out, they seem to gather their wits to make a sizable dent when it’s spam.
"The property" you mean the council housing where all the ganging, killing, raping and terror plotting occurs, right? Sure, the administration of said council should be jailed ASAP.
It is indeed completely illegal to own a property where illegal activities happen, know it and do nothing about it in France. Reporting the issue to the police is an adequate step. And yes, people have been jailed for owning apartments where terror plotting happened. Thank you for this good exemple.
For the good of the discussion, I would however appreciate if you kept your baseless fantasies about council housing - which is both numerous and very safe in France, a country which tries to do something to mitigate poverty - out of it.
District 13 excellent series of movies shows that council housing ("banlieues") is exactly where these crimes happen.
Banlieues are not “council housing”. HLM is council housing. Banlieues literally means suburbs.
Well, suburbs where these social houses are located and where police is afraid to go, stop pretending you dont know what all this is about.
This "shows" those things in much the same way that First Contact "shows" how one may convert a Titan missile into a 3-person faster-than-light spacecraft in a post-nuclear-war Bozeman, Montana.
if the administration took zero good faith demonstrable attempts to address it, then they should at least be removed from the position, yes.
if they refuse to take steps whatsoever, yes, that’s a problem. why does it feel like you both understand the problem yet are defending the problem at the same time?
According to this rule, approximately 100% of officials must be thrown out of their jobs right this second. I think you are mostly correct about irresponsibility, incompetence, and excuses, but I don't see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations. Especially in the situation, when people who take on, like all officials, have no responsibility
it’s still a bit muddy why he was arrested, but it seems like it’s due to his constant dismissal of any responsibility.
i’m not sure of the specifics of what you mean by 100% of officials must be thrown out” but if im understanding what you’re implying, i disagree, most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces . and if they don’t, then yes, why wouldn’t we hold them responsible?
it seems like you’re indicating there should be no consequences for people who don’t take on obligations…
of course they take on obligations, it’s partially why we pay executives so much because they’re taking on obligations. this isn’t some pauper struggling to pay rent on his studio apartment—he was arrested after traveling from one country to another in his private jet.
again, i haven’t spent much energy on the implications from effect iteration of this but we have pretty solid evidence of what happens when we allow these wannabe kings to claim they should have nothing but positive personal benefits while externalizing any negatives onto the rest of us.
“you should pay me obscene amounts and treat me like a king while i take no responsibility whatsoever” is absurd. and we’re seeing the cascading effects of this absurdity in real time.
And I am saying that zero percent of them do that. And somebody saying that Durov "take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces". My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
of course there is…
one of the reasons people justifiably bring up spam in these “my free speech” cases is because it shows definitively that the “free speech absolutists” don’t actually care about free speech—if they truly believed all speech is as valuable as all other speech then spam would have the same weight of priority as non-spam speech for them, yet they have no problem silencing spam.
off the top of my head, we would consider their guard rails against spam and have they implemented those same guard rails against the things they’re being charged for? if not, then obviously they’re not making real attempts.
of course there are multiple ways to determine whether they’ve made meaningful attempts. i think this is all moot though, if my understanding is correct, he’s resisted doing anything at all which is why he’s been charged.
as i said in a different post though, it’s still muddy on the specifics, we’ll know more later—we’re just wildly guessing at this point.
That's a strawman. They believe all speech should be held legally equal, not that's it's value is equal.
It's that any speech has the potential to be extremely valuable to the person not responsible for regulating it.
That's literally a thing that happens during trial, at least for certain crimes and legal systems.
Can't speak to this specific case because (1) IANAL, and (2) my grasp of the French language is so bad that I can't even reliably say the French for "I don't speak French".
https://www.criminal-lawyers.com.au/criminal-defences/lack-i...
Even if true, what then? It doesn't follow said property can be ethically transferred to anyone else; otherwise you've just thrown out all semblance of property rights. You've sold off the world to the HOA's, as it were; now anyone who objects to the way you maintain your grounds has a button to push to make sure you are deprived of any grounds you keep. Be they real, or digital.
If I make a platform that shuffles bits around, and a bunch of users start using it for CP and terrorism (lets assume perfect enforcement/investigative capability up until piercing the platform, so probability 1 on the CP/terrorism front); I don't think the choice then is "lets shluff this to someone responsible to admin/make a tap". The only ethically tenable approach would be "well, no more moving bits around by anyone for anyone else anymore". And at that point we've unmade computing essentially.
No one, and I mean "Not One Single Entity, government or otherwise" can be trusted to not to abuse privileged access; and once put into the position to abuse, abstain from doing so. Abuse is probability 1. This is part of why I believe Stallman was right. The concept of the user account has been a disaster for the human species. As it is by the prescribing of unique identifiers to discern one operation on behalf of someone from another that has created a world in which we can even imagine such horrifying concepts as a small group unilaterally managing the entirety of the rest of humanity, for any purpose.
For me it is a sobering thought on the impact of automated business systems. I've practically 180'd on actual character of my own life's work. It's got me in a spot where I'm strongly considering burning my tools. Extreme? Maybe. Sometimes though, you have to accept that there are extremely unpleasant consequences out there that cannot be satisfactorally mitigated.
So I have a return question for you. Are you sure that the question you asked is the one you should be asking, or should you be asking yourself, "how many lives are acceptable casualties in order to continue operating within the bounds of my assumed ethical envelope?" Because there is a counter of people effected; you may not be able to read it or write it, but it's there.
Not being a behemot is not an excuse if they are not moderating criminal behavior at all. I dont know if that is the case, just pointing that logic is not sound.
As many people say when Facebook's failures came to light: a tech company cannot pass the buck by blaming their inability to perform their legal obligations on scale.
If a business can't do a thing it is required to do, their CEO's option is "close business" or "break law".
Telegram allows to report illegal posts; I suggest that France arrests those who saw the posts but didn't report them instead.
To be fair, anyone that has used Telegram for a while know that this is just a mock option to fool regulators. You can report all you want; zero action is taken. There are dozens of accounts that joined groups I'm in to spam CSAM. We've reported them, kicked/banned them from the group. Months later you can look them up and they're still there and still active. They even post CSAM in their public (visible for everyone on their profile) stories.
How would I even know if zero action is taken? I see shit and I report it. I don't see it again.
Because we saw the same accounts pop up in other groups sometimes weeks later, so we started to keep track of the usernames after banning them. If you check their profile it's easy to see that they are active months later.
I tried to market something very small on Telegram and was surprised how fast my account got restricted.
Yes they do combat spam, but barely CSAM.
I’ve used tg daily for 7+ years and have never seen CSAM. What kind of groups are you in? Genuine question. I assume some sort of “teen” porn groups?
Absolutely not. This stuff happens in a lot of technology groups, custom ROM groups, even a small (but public) board game group got overrun with it once; multiple accounts posting dozens of CSAM videos/images in a minute after joining - kept going for a few weeks.
The amount of obviously illegal content on Telegram makes it plain that, for all intents and purposes, it is an un-moderated platform. They sporadically moderate when there's serious pressure, but for the most part do nothing.
What keeps amazing me is that this is supposed to make children's lives better, by helping social services.
Of course, such legislation only has any chance in hell of improving lives if the standard of living for children, the education, the ... IN social services is good. It is very easy to see this WILL put more children into such a situation, and that's about the only thing such legislation will definitely do. It is completely absurd to think this is going to end drugs, abuse or whatever else they're looking for.
Is that the case? Is it the case that the standard of living, education, ... in social services is good?
No. Not at all. There's constant scandals and if a child that gets into a social services institution makes it into university, just one, any given year, that's national news. Prostitution in social services is common, drugs and crime are everywhere.
It seems there is A LOT more work to be done on the other side of social services first. They seem to perform VERY badly once they actually catch someone. So why do this? Because it isn't to help children. At the very best they see this as a cheap way to look like they're improving social services.
They're building the penthouse suite with all the luxuries you could imagine, but the foundation is rotting away and, if anything, becoming more ignored rather than increasingly important.
It lays bare that their motivation is blanket surveillance for their own political ends and nothing to do with protecting children in the slightest.
Social Services are one of the most consistently underfunded and under-resources arms of government.
Australia has recently had to "increase the bar" at which mandatory reporting is required because the resources don't exist to even consider investigation of cases where the child's life isn't in immediate danger.
It's gross, but it seems politics around the world has found it's shared water level, and that level is happy with exploiting exploited children.
It's so disingenuous to say it's just a small requirement. It always starts off small than grows and grows into ever widening topics and unfavourable people. We've seen that plenty of times on the internet and in history. The good intentions in the early days won't make any difference in 20yrs from now.
They occasionally remove copyright violating files, so they do something.
I think you read my clumsy sentence backwards. They absolutely want to get in the middle of messaging, all of them. This is behind many of the calls for E2E interop as well -- all the proposals I'm aware of call for termination somewhere in the middle; you can imagine who'd like to be at that termination middle point. This is why Apple will not "move over" to RCS, ever, as a first class transport -- it's fundamentally no more secure than OTA plaintext to existing persistent threat actors.
So just give me an apple messaging client on my non-apple devices. It is insanely, practically criminally, anti-social to lock your messaging system into your devices alone. It's like the Joker is running the business decisions over there. Who cares, let's just watch the world burn.
Asking cause I don’t know - can you provide iOS level iMessage encryption safely on Android when you don’t control the hardware?
Safety wise, Signal (or PGP email) on GrapheneOS is probably as good as it gets since it's all audited free open source code.
I didn't know Signal app had access to a secure enclave chip.
That is not the definition of secure.
It's not, but it's a feature that makes it incomparable to iMessage.
I don't see how.
AFAIK, Signal doesn’t provide any way to prove its application were built from non-modified audited free open source code. Indeed there are evidences it behaves “a bit” differently.
So unless you’ve built application by yourself, you have no guarantee of it’s sequrity.
When your threat model is "someone on the network intercepting messages", it doesn't matter if you control the hardware. When your threat model is "someone owns my device", it still doesn't matter if you control the hardware, because, in that scenario, Apple is the bad actor you're trying to protect against.
There's no scenario where a third party has compromised your phone without Apple's collaboration, which is the only scenario where the secure enclave would maybe protect you (and even then, the bad actor would just read your messages off the screen or memory directly).
In principle you can do the same thing of having keys in a secure enclave that can only be accessed if the bootloader and OS were signed with an appropriate key and not revoked. In practice there would certainly be a larger attack surface because you've now got n different hardware secure enclaves, n different bootloaders, and n different OS implementations, and a flaw in any one of them is potentially all that an attacker needs. Would you allow apple to apply a high standard and e.g. blacklist manufacturers who repeatedly had holes in their implementation? Would you trust Huawei's implementation to not have a hidden backdoor accessible only to the Chinese state and not discoverable otherwise? (Do you trust Apple's implementation to not have the same for the US/Israel?)
Why? I'm allowed to connect two or more tin cans by a string. Why can't Apple?
If you don't have a tin can, then you can't join.
A handful of EU MEPs keep pushing backdoored encryption and it keeps getting veto’d.
There are two legistive bodies in the EU, one is only allowed to propose law, the other is only allowed to vote on it.
Lots of braindead laws get put to a vote, theres no requirement that they get through.
I understand that raising the alarm is helpful, but it would be helpful if people took a second to understand how the EU works, the politicians involved and how their motions are perceived by the rest of parliament.
Chat Control isn't pushed by a "handful of EU MEPs", but the European Commission.
Notably, it can be agreed upon in the EC using qualified majority, unilateral veto doesn't apply.
The last time they tried (in June), the qualified majority wasn't reached, but the difference was slim.
3 actually, (the second body you described can be categorised as bicameral)
Which would be pedantry if it weren't that one of the two chambers is much more in line with the former
Perhaps you got thrown by the double negative?
means
No, it doesn't?
Does it?
Nope. There was a proposal pushed by corporate lobby groups that got shot down.
The EU usually takes 3 steps forward, 1 to 2 steps backwards.
These two sentences cannot be both true
Using this as a means to manufacture consent to implement-enforce such systems, and then what regulation will be used to counter the tyrannical takeover of these systems - who may be the most vile child predators seeking control-power to be able to do what they want - to pillage, rape, and murder as they please?
In the UK, I have a stormtrooper standing behind me in my bedroom as I type this. He just asked me to explain the context of the message I'm writing to you now.
But here's the thing. If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable. You run a carrier service. Much like the owner of omegle found out, yes you do have a duty of care. You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit. You live in fairytale land if you think you can.
What do you mean by "knowingly providing a service to a criminal"? Is Elon Mask then guilty for providing access to Twitter for Trump?
Well much like the owner of omegle found out you can't provide platforms for criminal activities and make no effort to curb it. It only takes a 30 second google before you find telegram rooms offering all kinds of illegal stuff. You don't find that on Twitter. Twitter is atleast mildly moderated. Telegram could have moderation built in to catch illegal activities but it chooses to do nothing. See the difference?
For fun, I tried that and was unsuccessful, at least in the allotted time.
Google turned up many third-party references to illegal activity on Telegram, but that's not the same thing.
You have to use the Search built into Telegram and you can find illegal stuffs within seconds.
Search for any of these phrases and it will return tons of channels to join:
- Combo lists - Check fraud - Redline Stealer - Bank logs
There are tens of thousands of channels on Telegram w illegal content and material.
I really do hope they dont shut it down bc it's an extremely valuable asset in terms of intelligence and monitoring criminals haha
Source: I work in CTI and actively monitor and scan thousands of Telegram channels.
I'm not sure whether to "thank" you for what sounds like my exciting new hobby!
It's a lot of fun and a super neat project! I totally nerd out on it.
I used python and the Telethon and Pyrogram frameworks to help scrape and monitor em.
A paid Telegram account can be in 1k channels/groups. A free Telegram account can be in 500 channels/groups.
Good luck and happy programming!
Telegram is end-to-end encrypted in private chats, the Telegram team doesn't even know what people are discussing. Same should happen with Whatsapp or Signal. Should Whatsapp or Signal be accountable for what terrorists talk in private?
App can have internal keyword check that could open backdoor to law enforcement when certain terms are said. *fbi enters the conversation* probably won't be in your chat log anytime soon but you can't argue telegram, signal and whatsapp can't do it. Whatsapp being fbs darling almost certainly does already and signal servers anti spam folder is smelling mighty like a five eyes backdoor.
Tbh given both those apps company's have dealings with gov in aus I'm gonna say signals probably already got a backdoor into em. If you don't think so you don't know aus law well enough or who signals are.
Also the owners of the apps aren't liable for the content of the conversations. Their liable for providing a platform for the conversation to take place and for not knowingly taking available efforts to curb criminal activity on that platfor/service. It's like hey I'm gonna rent you a store house to hide all your illegal drugs in Mr gang member. I'm not doing the hiding or anything but I'm assisting the activity by providing the store house. I could make efforts to curb such activity like you know doing a rental inspection once every six months but I choose not to and turn a blind eye. Am I assisting a crime or am I completely innocent? Now repeat this but telegram is the store house.
Telegram has an open-source client and is moving to verifiable builds (not on every platform). You cannot hide such a backdoor, and users would be able to recompile a clean version of the app.
Not by default (unlike the other services you've mentioned )?
The fun fact is that while Telegram won't make use of something akin to PicDNA to automatically detect CSAM, it will very happily take down your channel or group if you distribute copyrighted material.
They do know how to respond to copyright complaints. Not so much about other, far more serious sort of illegal activities. Just on that point, they should have expected something to be done against them.
Twitter already got warned about hosting Trump by the EU.
That warning was not an official EU position:
https://www.ft.com/content/09cf4713-7199-4e47-a373-ed5de61c2...
https://archive.ph/zugnf
Ursula von der Leyen is not the Queen of the EU, no matter how much she'd like to be. Other people have the authority to speak and act officially without checking with her. That doesn't make their statements any less official, nor would her endorsement make them any more official.
"Official" in the sense that the statement carries the complete backing of the institution and is a public declaration of its position.
The fact that it was wound back by the head of the EU's executive branch - Breton's boss - demoted the statement to "the opinion of the commissioner".
I don't remember anything about "the opinion of the commissioner" in the letter, but there was huge "eu commission" sign right on the top. So the letter went as complitly "official" position of commission.
Note that the article says:
So maybe he didn't need to get permission from anyone to send the letter.
The contents of the letter are within his brief, but the timing of it was done in such a way as to impact the EU's foreign policy, which lies outside of his remit.
Great, arrest both, I don't like them anyway.
You realize that every social media/forum/messaging app should be banned then and every CEO in jail. Bad actors will use anything they can.
No because those platforms make the values token effort to curb illegal activity via moderation be it user performed or done by their own employees. Telegram does not do this. Anywhere at all. It's very different.
I know chat rooms that have been nuked for Pornography etc. I reported some chats where I've seen inappropriate content and I received notifications that they were deleted. A lot of users are muted/banned too for illegal activities. It isn't exactly unmoderated, but the staff can't exactly search every single server under the sun for illegal material or activities. You probably don't know how bad Matrix is, out of 200k servers, 70k were banned for CSAM and there are still a lot of them around.
Last time I used Telegram and had a look at the "discussions around your area" or something, I couldn't find anything that wasn't about selling drugs or fake documents. It was a giant drug delivery platform.
It might be different in other places but here, in a large city of continental Europe, Telegram is definitely little more than an enabler for illegal activities.
Note that selling drugs is a victimless crime. Also, you could report those illegal posts, or you knowingly and willingly allowed criminals to continue their activities?
Reporting these posts is ineffective, which is the whole point of the arrest.
The victim of drugs is the whole society. It's only "victimless" in an absolutely individualistic environment, which I wouldn't even call a "society".
But none of this contradicts my initial comment. Telegram is a straight enabler of illegal activities.
Arrest Telegram channel mods then
Well, it really tells you haven't tried buying drugs on Telegram. It is all scammers, every single one of them (maybe with the exception for prostitutes but I bet most of these are scam too). There is pretty much 0% chance you'll buy drugs or fake documents using the geo search. They will scam you for a transfer and disappear. It really is no that different from a spam email, just different media and targeting.
That said, you CAN buy drugs on Telegram, sure, it is just not as easy as everyone seems to think. You need to know the account name of a service that delivers in your area, you need to be reeealy careful when typing the account name because for every real drug seller account there are multiple fakes with slight variation in the name that fish for people using search, and then even if you have a verified account and they sold you drugs last month, there is like 30% chance that the account have been compromised and now you are talking with scammers again.
I went ahead with a prostitute who wrote to me on tg.
She first asked where I was and was very coincidentally there as well. A sure sign of a scam.
Then asked me to buy a steam card and take a photo of the code before "meeting".
Apple literally won a case against the FBI on this. That's the US tho of course with First Amendment and everything...
The Telegram fanatics for some reason are unwilling to hear it but we'll say it again: the reason why we still have an Internet in 2024 is that all those services at least attempt some form of moderation.
With more or less success, sure, but they can at least say there is an attempt and they do take down stuff. Durov pretty much brags about not doing the bare minimum.
It's that simple.
Telegram allows to report illegal content to moderators. Jail those who saw the content but didn't report it.
I am sure all those claims in the media about "cooperating with terrorists" is just a lie. Probably it is something related to not implementing fingerprints for copyrighted material.
The internet of 2024 is much different than the internet of the 20th century.
It’s become centralized and controlled by the hands of the few.
This is not an improvement.
I upvoted your comment so that it has a bit of visibility because I know some people think this, but I disagree with it, very strongly.
First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.
Second, you propose your preferred moral economy as one that only curtails harms. In fact, you create another harm implementing what you think is right.
Reasonable people disagree about which is worse -- the creation and public support of a technocratic oligarchy in control of how humans communicate or the proliferation of some harms that take advantage of unfettered communication. But please don't be simple minded, pretending to yourself or others that there aren't real costs, social and physical, on both sides of this.
For myself, I think private communications are a human right and a massive good for society, and I don't condone criminal acts undertaken using messaging.
and they're usually public property and policed. Routine police inspection on a road and in particular control of borders and key nodes in your transportation infrastructure isn't exactly controversial. (unless you're part of some extreme political faction). You know a lot of countries where people can drive without a license plate?
Private communication is important but it has always had limits, this crypto mentality of companies exercising no compliance, having no borders, ignoring the law and national security doesn't have a precedent. Historically people communicated say in the US using an American telecommunications network which without a doubt complied with legal requests. It's not at all self evident that we should tolerate telecoms infrastructure operated by a Russian out of Dubai that is primarily used by an enemy we're effectively at war with.
That's because they are different, police can come with a warrant to check your house for illegal activity but they can't monitor you remotely 24/7 with barely any human intervention and store everything you do indefinitely. With electronic communication you either get full privacy or none.
And no, putting company's in charge of your privacy isn't a solution, if they can be compelled to give away your communication history then they'll abuse it. Have you not learned anything from the Snowden leaks?
Police got a warrant for Durov and arrested him. How is that different? Yet some people are upset anyways.
And it's not true that with electronic communication you either get full privacy or none. You can have end-to-end encrypted messages with unencrypted metadata, so that when police observe a message implicating the sender in a crime (e.g. on an arrested suspect's phone) they can get a search warrant for the IP address or phone number associated with that account and then visit the owner in person to look at the messages on their phone. This doesn't allow police to read everyone's messages all the time undetected, but does allow them to read specific people's messages if they get a warrant.
Since Telegram doesn't only have unencrypted metadata but also plenty of unencrypted messages, there must've been many cases where a search warrant would've yielded lots of useful information. If Telegram didn't properly respond to all warrants, it seems fair to launch an investigation.
According to the Telegram FAQ (https://www.telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests) data on their servers is encrypted and the keys are split and stored in different jurisdictions (and different from the jurisdiction where the data is stored).
With such a setup what does it mean to comply with warrants? Are we saying that Telegram should voluntarily yield all information regardless of jurisdiction?
Ah, this multi-jurisdiction setup explains why Durov himself was targeted. As the presumed controlling entity behind that network of shell companies, serving him with a warrant seems like the most effective legal means to make Telegram comply.
I think private communications are a human right as well. But I don’t think every conceivable way of communicating must be private. You can always go outside and talk privately with your neighbour.
To use your analogy: shouldn’t everyone look away when you drive by so that you can have private road usage?
There is tinted windows for that. I agree that not everything is private. But if two or more parties want to be able to communicate privately it most certainly shouldn't be the government making that impossible. It would be like mandating everyone must wear their state issued camera and microphone.
While I agree that private communication should be a human right I also do think that your analogy is wrong.
"roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly."
All of those can be monitored by the government, even your letters could be.
What if you write your letters in a cipher?
Indeed. NIMBYs in my area claim that we should shut down the train because criminals come from the inter city to commit crimes and then return to the city after. I see the claims against telegram to be the same.
There are entire Telegram groups devoted to publishing CSAM. They're publicly available, not E2E encrypted. Being there in such a channel puts the data on your device, unencrypted. You can report it all you want. Nothing happens. Been there, done it.
It is not just that. Weapons. Drugs. Terrorism [1]. Pornography depicting rape.
[1] Includes accelerationism. France just had a terrorist attack on a synagogue. Germany had one on a city festival. Could be related to either. We don't know!
And yet, with all above being said, as much of a cesspool Telegram is, I much rather have such centralized there than in an application with group E2E encryption. But even then, every once in a while you want to scare the herd to demotivate their (criminal) effort, just be careful not to flock them to a better alternative. Which is a real risk.
Why stop there? By your logic, the owners of every ISP that provides a pathway for those criminal bits also should be in jail. Every single organization in that pathway would be liable from the registrars to the developers of web libraries or other app services. The governments themselves would be liable in many cases where the government has nationalized internet services.
There is a principle in the free world that one is not criminally liable for the speech of others. This is the principle that allows ISP's, newspapers, web forums, Google, etc. etc. to exist. You demand that the principle be violated and the Internet be destroyed. I disagree.
Because we want to, and we can. I don't get how HN consistently fails to understand the actual social and political process by which regulations are made. I constantly see this argument which effectively boils down to "if you ban a thing, you will also need to ban everything else, which is absurd, so you shouldn't ban anything". But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.
It is open to society to decide that Telegram is more proximate to the harm being caused, and less otherwise socially useful, than an ISP, and on that basis punish the former but not the latter. (It is also reasonable to argue that Telegram is not sufficiently proximate to the harm and that it is sufficiently socially useful that it should be allowed to operate, and honestly I sympathise with that argument more. But my point is that it is a matter of weighing social harm vs benefit and not just a technical analysis of "where the bits go".)
If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Arguing "ah, but by that logic you'll also have to jail the guy who sold the robber his breakfast" isn't going to cut it, and rightly so.
Because 'we' want to. Who is this 'we' you are speaking about? Globalist authoritarian elite that you are somehow part of? Democratic voters? Communication application users? Whose this 'we'?
"We" is clearly the people who make the laws in this context (ie, not me personally).
Bad analogy.
Better one is that your a taxi driver and someone who committed a crime hops into your car for a ride, then you’re found guilty by association.
Well in Telegram's case the idea is that they knowingly provide taxi services to those criminals and do supposedly nothing when it's reported to them because they are "too small" to moderate everything
This is the principle behind, and popularize by, Nazism and Soviet-style communism. In short, it is the arbitrary use of force against whichever targets the ruling bureaucrats deem to be "socially harmful". This principle leads inevitably to mass murder and war, as history has shown repeatedly and without exception.
You seem to fantasize that you'll be in the in-group who gets to decide who is harmful. But then one day it will be you who is considered harmful. And the state will sacrifice your life for the "benefit of society".
If we start weighing "social harm vs benefit" and not "where the bits go" - we quickly come to the Third Reich and "social harm vs benefit" of the Jewish people.
No, that is by your own logic, not GPs. GP clearly said: "You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit.". Considering that ISPs do something about that activity, by GPs logic, owners of ISP should not be in jail. Am I worng?
Telegram, an app known to be used for illegal activity, isn't blocked by French ISPs?
Yes, you are wrong. Let me explain. GP laid out his principle above: "If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable."
He doesn't say that doing "jack shit" (not exactly a fleshed out legal term) will remove that liability, as you are suggesting.
E2EE should be a human right. Period.
There are other ways to capture and ensnare criminals. Sacrificing our privacy for the "greater good" is a bridge too far.
As one counter point, think about all of the completely fine human behaviors that instantly become kompromat when the powers have access to your every communication. That is way more dangerous to democracy, freedom, and liberty than a slightly smaller chance of "not protecting the children".
Besides, if we actually cared so much about children, we wouldn't let them not get school lunches, we wouldn't sell them on gambling and gacha games, and we'd do a much better job of educating them.
Famous quote that if you sacrifice freedom for security, you will get neither.
*sigh* Dude, if it's really that relevant and compelling at least quote it properly. It's 2024, finding and copy-pasting is barely slower than typing a bad paraphrase.
-- A committee which included Benjamin Franklin
_____________
That said, this quote is typically misused, or at best being used wayyy outside its original context. [0]
The Penn family, the local semi-nobility of Pennsylvania, are offering the government a one-time "donation"... in exchange for getting a perpetual exemption from all taxes.
A committee of elected representatives--among them Franklin--are strongly opposed to it, since they believe the democratic legislature's "essential Liberty" to impose taxes for its citizens is way more important than any "temporary Safety" of a one-time lump sum.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01...
Heh. So the liberty in the context is the liberty to tax? Like, all uses of the quote I have seen has been in spirit of something of the opposite.
He's finding it applicable more than the narrow historical context and using it here. You can disagree with it but its not a 'misuse'
Perhaps, but Telegram is not really a E2EE chat app, but rather a social media. Like 90% of Telegram use (at least in my circles) is channels which are not E2EE on Telegram.
This arrest is not about E2EE.
The arrest is about how much responsibility social media platforms have about the content posted on them.
There is no good answers to that question, and the debate of topic online is utterly useless.
By that logic, any app that provides privacy from governments spying is a criminal enterprise.
Well I mean in many countries, blocking the surveillance agency from listening in on your calls/texts/chats is illegal. So making an app that interferes with the agencies ability to "listen in" is infact a criminal enterprise.
Don't have to like it but the law is the law.
That's when people should not comply
So all implementation of encryption is illegal, that's basically your stance? Because that's exactly what encryption does.
What about toilet paper? It's used by quite some criminals (not all that said: many criminals have very poor hygiene and just put their undies back on without wiping after number two).
Should we arrest people manufacturing toilet paper?
Anyway we all know it's not about criminals: it's about controlling speech so that protests as in Barcelona, the UK (where people who are denouncing rapes and killings are put in jail, while the actual rapists get very light sentences like only six months in jail), etc. cannot organize themselves.
It's about controlling the narrative.
And they're using useful idiots resorting to broken logic to push their totalitarian agenda.
EU has been complaining about Telegram's end-to-end encryption for a long time and they want to implement some regulations to basically add backdoors into all messaging apps. I don't really see how this case will go on since at least private chats are encrypted so Telegram (theoretically at least) can't see the contents.
Except Telegram has much less E2EE than Signal or Whatsapp.
It's not on by default, works only between 2 devices, they both have to be online at the same time and you can't access anything from the web. And group chats don't support it at all. Private chats are not end to end encrypted by default and it's actually quite clumsy to encrypt them so almost nobody uses it.
It's really weird that Telegram is singled out like this.
I can't tell if it's just uninformed grassroots mistrust of big tech, or the result of astroturf PsyOps to get more people to use the app with weaker encryption.
Encryption is really not the main issue here. I think nerds may not fully grasp Telegram's security model: it's essentially stateless, not tied to any particular country. Its infrastructure is distributed across various jurisdictions, with no official representation in many countries—no subsidiaries, nothing.
As a result, it doesn't respond to authorities because it doesn't have to. However, this approach is unsustainable and unacceptable for many governments, both in the East and the West. That's why he's being accused in France: he is not "cooperating with law enforcement".
I don't think that's accurate. Like any other business, he collects money from the Western users, so that's one easy choke point. He is also fully accountable to Apple, otherwise he can forget about 1.5 billion Iphone users forever. (apparently, he also just seems to enjoy visiting France and other countries he decided to go against)
What does this even mean???
He is partially accountable to Apple - he's agreed to a TOS and EULA, as well as conditions for furnishing his Apps. Even with Apple's authoritarian control of their ecosystem though, he isn't fully accountable to Apple. Apple is not a nation or a court that can make decisions like that on their behalf; they have been sued several times for taking punitive action that is illegal obstruction.
Nobody is "fully accountable" to Apple. Apple is fully accountable to the law, and that's that.
he has to disclose his company's location, where they are paying taxes, probably how much money they are making, which makes it far from "stateless, not tied to any particular country". Through that, he also is forced to comply with local laws that Apple plays by, or get kicked out of those countries iPhones', or the App Store entirely. Apple can and does take that action by requests from local governments, e.g. remove a gay dating app from Turkey's app store by the government request.
Or it could be that he has French citizenship; subject to French law. Spreading your infrastructure across legal jurisdiction doesn't make you stateless - it just ensures you're subject to the laws of each jurisdiction you operate in.
Because Telegram is not just a messenger, it's a platform for distributing news/info through channels. Signal simply does not have that.
Signal and WhatsApp do have that. You can easily use group chats that way, you just have to get invited. You can't look for them and join them.
It's really easy for e.g. a drugdealer to post QR codes or something on lamp posts with their contact and then they can invite people. Making Telegram go away is just going to hide the problem, not solve it.
Afaik WhatsApp and signal group chats have been way to small for that.
In Telegram you can have 10k and more in a channel
Aaaah yes, the standard political "solution".
In a way, Durov's arrest retroactively vindicates every EU citizen's decision to use Telegram (up until now), as it proves that they haven't been getting what they want from him. I am not nearly as concerned about Durov himself or the government of Dubai getting to read my messages as I am about the EU or one of its member states doing so, as there simply isn't much I can see the former doing with that data. The real danger only arises when the people who can read your messages and the people who can dispatch dudes with guns to your house are in cahoots. (For the same reason, I tend to roll my eyes at warnings about various forms of Chinese spyware.)
Why would you be afraid of EU LE? Unlike countries such as Iran, Russia, SA, UAE it has reasonable laws.
Iran and Russia also had reasonable laws once. Then things changed. The problem is, you can't delete your old chats from the %EU_NSA_analogue%'s servers once they get there. The funniest part is, you might think that you are safe because that one sussy message was posted so long ago. Well, statutes of limitations are changed/ignored just as easily as any other law.
wasn't he bragging that he operates with like a dozen people or something. I can also see him just punting on many kinds of moderation (outside of the kind that helps running the service), because it's a lot of subjective, dirty work and an army of people.
If you don't cooperate while having the data and your approach to legal compliance is "votes on your personal TG channel", expect to get arrested. At least the services with actual E2EE worth a shit can make a convincing argument they can't produce the data.
It's because it is in fact used for this, unlike say whatsapp that does not enjoy any trust.
Going after the one with the least care factor first would make a lot of sense, assuming their cryptographic implementation is inline with their care factor.
That was my first thought as well. There are good uses for telegram and some things work better than signal ( API comes to mind ). But just from privacy perspective, telegram is much more easily neutered than signal.
I will admit I am confused. I can only assume something else is at play.
edit: The only thing I can think of is that there some rather gruesome channels showing Russia/Ukraine, Palestine/Israel toll. I wonder if it was decided that general population should not have access to these.
Are they going to arrest Zuckerberg and Tim Cook next for the encryption in WhatsApp and iMessage?
Maybe not, if they already got backdoors?
If Apple hypothetically agreed to iMessage backdoors, why would you trust the Telegram app updates served up by Apple's app store? Western government's can pretty much hack into any device they want - the only reason for backdooring messaging apps would be for dragnet surveillance, and I don't see big tech having the appetite for the bad publicity and lawsuits that will result when that inevitably becomes public
Apple already has a kind of "backdoor": they store the keys for encrypted cloud backups in their cloud as well. They advertise that cloud data are encrypted but prefer not to mention that they also have a key to decrypt it. Even with the highest level of security [1] your contacts list in Apple Cloud are not encrypted. Why? Probably someone asked for this.
[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
No, it’s because the CardDAV standard was not created with encryption in mind. It’s also why calendar and mail are not encrypted in iCloud.
CSV or PNG weren't created with encryption in mind, but one can easily encrypt them. Apple can always make their own proprietary protocol. This doesn't explain anything. However the version that the govt wants to be able to see who is in person't contact list explains it well.
If Apple did that, people like me would accuse them of EEE.
We don’t trust proprietary stuff because we’ve been burned by it, if there’s an open standard, even a worse one: use it.
If it’s really that bad, we need to improve the standard.
As I understand, this protocol is used between an iPhone and iCloud and it being open or not doesn't change anything because there is no alternative iCloud or iPhone.
You’re mistaken, you don’t only connect to your iCloud from iPhones.
You connect from any compatible client; and the effort that has gone in to the Mail client for iOS means it’s a decent enough mail client for non-iCloud mail accounts too.
Apples closed ecosystem is mostly its developer tooling and iMessage.
You can download Telegram straight from its website, if you're using Android. No need to trust a third-party.
If your rationale against first-party backdoors relies on this logic, then you're in for a really big surprise when you read the Snowden leaks.
I wouldn't. I don't trust Apple hardware or software, and I don't see why anyone who cares about these issues ever would. But fortunately Telegram runs on devices and OSes from a wide range of suppliers, many of which might be less open to the influences that apply to Apple.
I mean I wouldn't complain if they did.
Perhaps they already have backdoors, but don't tell everyone.
No, because then they'd have to acknowledge that WhatsApp and iMessage are both compromised.
What makes you believe those do not have backdoors for Western powers?
They are US citizens, nobody dares to arrest them (except for Russia and North Korea).
Private chats are a hassle to initiate and not multi-device.
Most use normal chats.
With anonymous accounts, using anonymous +888 numbers, whose price has increased from $16 to $1000+ in a matter of a year, it is indeed a very convenient playground for all sorts of activities.
Why would a criminal mastermind pay $1000 for an anonymous Telegram account when they could buy a burner phone with a prepaid SIM included for like $20 to register and throw it out? In my experience the people who buy those are more Durov superfan than Keyser Söze. And evidence of criminality on Telegram predates the Fragment numbers by a while - for instance in like 2014-2015 pretty much the only time Telegram was in the news was in connection to ISIS. They could also just use Signal which is provably private.
"Burner phones" are a TV trope of the 90s and 00s. In most countries you cannot get a phone number without registering your ID with the telecom provider.
I’m referring to tracfones or similar prepaid devices which you can buy in the US for very cheap. In other countries if you apply yourself just a little bit you can get the same result. Greece has SIM card registration yet you can buy pre registered ones off the street in Athens. Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Estonia, UK, and other countries have no SIM card registration at all and roaming works good across the EU. And you only need the number once to sign up.
Some countries require you to provide a government id, which is logged, to get a new sim.
In which countries are the vendors of anonymous numbers located?
There are no vendors, Telegram issues those numbers. So it's basically a pass to create account w/o mobile number requirement, if you're ready to pay for it.
Interesting, https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/7/23498236/telegram-fragmen...
> To get an anonymous number, you need to go purchase one through the Fragment blockchain... Durov calls Fragment “an amazing success” that already generated over $50 million in sales in less than a month.
Aren't open source apps like Jabber or Element which do not require a phone number and allow to host your own server, a much better playground?
Yes, and XMPP over Tor already seems to be popular on the dark web.
It was the default method of contacting the dealers on Russian darknet when everything was a just a message board (hell, it was available without TOR) and not a proper marketplace
Security theater.
SimpleX is the real deal.
Here's the thing, all the politicians use WhatsApp.
They actually don't want that backdoored, guaranteed.
EU politicians did (try to) explicitly exempt themselves from their own chat surveillance laws,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063025 ("ChatControl: EU ministers want to exempt themselves (european-pirateparty.eu)", 202 comments)
That makes sense though. We all know all politicians are saints and would never fall prey to corruption or criminal interests. /s
/s aside, politicians need privacy for the same reason the rest of us do: they work with sensitive information and it's really important they don't get blackmailed.
Simultaneously, they need a light shone on their private lives for the same reason they want to do that to the rest of us: to make sure they're not abusing their access to sensitive information, getting blackmailed, or otherwise being nefarious.
I have absolutely no idea how to fix this apparent paradox. Perhaps it can't be done. Even if it can, tech is unstable and this is all a moving target — the way GenAI is going, I suspect that we'll all have to carry always-on cameras that log and sign everything just to prove we didn't do whatever some picture or video shows us doing.
Yeah good luck with that :')
PS: A change to "guilty until proven innocent" policy would require a serious constitutional change in most countries.
Indeed, though there I was thinking more the court of public opinion which loves hearsay and rumour.
The actual law? I have no idea. Tech will change the world before the law can catch up with yesterday.
You mean railway station locker codes for bags of money from Quatar?
You've quoted two things there, so that's a two-part question.
For blackmail I mean e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research
For sensitive information, I mean e.g. a whistleblower has contacted them, or they're working out the finances for next year and there's potential for market manipulation based on the discussions so far, or they're discussing an emergency (health/economic/military) response that will be unpopular with someone no matter what.
If you are with your example referring to some specific example of them committing crimes, I refer you to my second paragraph in the original message:
That concept is as old as politics itself, the Romans already stated quod licet Iovi non licet bovi (What's allowable for Jupiter is not allowed for cattle), the modern version of which is rules for thee, not for me or do as I say, not as I do.
BTW, install your own XMPP server and use OMEMO-compatible clients - Conversations on Android, Gajim on desktop - and you get to have access to non-surveilled [1]communications just like those politico's.
[1] assuming that your client and server devices remain uncompromised, not a given if you happen to be a high-value target. Caveat emptor.
WhatsApp's E2E may not be backdoored (maybe), but it is 100% backdoored for metadata and social graph (contacts, group membership, etc.) Example of this : https://scroll.in/article/1044425/how-a-cross-border-love-st...
An even more egregious example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245 Facebook-Meta and Whatsapp maybe accessories to warcrimes perpetrated on a massive scale.
We've definitely had that: “official” government business over WhatsApp to ensure no retention rules apply.
Yep, classic backdoor for thee, but not for me!
But they recommend Signal themselves...
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc...
Also Telegram is not E2E by default. You need to activate it per chat. By default and in groups it is only server encrypted.
The main problem with Telegram is it’s not subject to Western surveillance and censorship. Best I can tell, it’s also not subject to Eastern surveillance and censorship which is why it was (unsuccessfully) banned in Russia in 2018. As of right now, this is one of the few places where you can find true information about WW3 which is currently ongoing in Ukraine. This is true of all sides of the conflict: the only truly uncensored source right now is Telegram, whether you’re in Ukraine, in Russia or in the west. People investing hundreds of billions of dollars into the war do not like this lack of control over the narrative. That is why Durov is in jail.
And how to you find the true uncensored information between all the propaganda on telegram?
That’s easy. You pick a channel that agrees with your general view of your world.
So echo chambers
You look at both sides and try to get some nuggets of truth out of that mountain of bullshit by checking what doesn’t line up. Thing is, though, if you only look at the mainstream media, you can’t even figure out what’s bullshit - the conflicting narratives are suppressed so well that editors of Pravda would blush.
Same as on every other platform?
"The deputy speaker of the state Duma, Vladislav Davankov, said he had called on Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to secure Durov’s release. “The arrest of [Durov] could have political motives and be a means of obtaining the personal data of Telegram users. We must not allow this,” he said on his Telegram channel."
https://www.ft.com/content/c5d40e3c-9f9c-43dc-a467-1c713b40c...
That makes me wonder if Telegram was always a Russian spook op and its [ineffective] banning just a ruse.
I don't think any of the major platforms are independent of some spook oversight.
Yes, in case like Facebook it would be easy to say that it provides information to the U.S. gov.
With Telegram, as you say, the Russian ban (somewhere around 2014) could have been designed to signal that Telegram is not run by the FSB.
This arrest, on the other hand, could have been intended signal that Telegram is not run by the CIA.
There have been a couple of house searches, extradition orders and YouTube bans all in the last two weeks for pro Russian commentators. I always wonder if these individuals are genuine or actually working for the U.S. gov.
Anyway, together with the latest crackdown of the EU on Musk all these events could be genuine and not staged.
Speculative. We don't know why he is in jail. Maybe his lawyers know why, maybe not. Maybe the prosecutor knows, maybe not. We don't know if there's a case. There's hardly anything we do know.
My take is he doesn't reply to LE requests related to CSAM. That is one of the few things we (as in: our governments) don't like anywhere in the world, and Telegram is known to respond slowly to [such] requests. But I won't pretend I know for sure. Cause either way, it is a neat honeypot compared to technically better protocols.
I find it highly amusing that people on here actually think secure messaging platforms are "locally backdoored".
Despite what the article says, Telegram is not even a nominally end-to-end encrypted platform. You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform.
"You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform."
What do you mean by this?
On Telegram, even private messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default. The so-called secret chats are end-to-end encrypted but are a major pain to use.
It's opt in