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Telegram CEO charged in France for ‘allowing criminal activity’ on messaging app
(www.theguardian.com)
Telegram has no end to end encryption by default.
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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Wording is confusing. Here are some better takes that sound valid and are true:
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Telegram's e2ee is only available for chats of 2 people, and only on official mobile client.
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Telegram's e2ee is a feature you have to enable whenever you need it (called secret chats).
and only on official mobile client.
This is incorrect, it is also available in other mobile clients (at least those which are forks of the official one).
Yeah, I'm siding with the French government on this one at first blush. E2EE platforms are a necessary tool for combating government overreach and corporate surveillance. But if you willingly make a platform that's not E2EE, the idea of users being able to share this vile shit being a "necessary evil" toward the greater societal good completely falls apart. If you 1) have this vile content on your platform, 2) know it exists, 3) can trivially combat it in a targeted manner, and 4) choose not to, then you're complicit in its distribution.
I have no sympathy for a CEO who tries to dupe their userbase into believing their app is private and then not even take advantage of the one single ethical benefit to the platform not being E2EE.
That's a wild way of twisting the logic. Just because the platform doesn't fall under your e2ee definition doesn't mean they had to do something that is only possible on purely cloud services.
The reason for arrest doesn't even have anything to do with encryption. All content that facilitates mentioned crimes is public. Handling it shouldn't involve any backdoors or otherwise service-side decryption.
It is about encryption though. Since it's possible for him to get access to anything said in those group chats, they asked him to provide all Telegram has on those users and chats. He didn't, he got arrested.
He wouldn't have been in as much trouble if those chats were encrypted and Telegram couldn't know anything about what's said in what chat by which user.
Because hw wouldn't be "betraying" his users by giving everything that was asked of him by the authorities.
Again, the materials are in public groups. Anyone with an account can see them. If we imagine that Telegram had the same functionality as it does now over E2EE, the offending users would be sharing their keys in public, and Telegram would still be as viable.
Telegram deserves some pushback for misrepresenting themselves as secure (and for lying about their connections to Russia), but I wish Moxie fanboys were able to talk about Telegram without shouting "it's not E2EE" over and over because they don't understand it's a social network disguised as a messenger.
It would not be the same, access might remain public but if it was E2EE and not stored on Telegram's servers, new users wouldn't have access to the history of the channel.
And since Telegram would not be able to read the messages as they go through its servers, they would have plausible deniability if they were asked if they knew what was going on on which channels.
I don't think Signal is the best messenger out there, I do think it's an good compromise between privacy and to have a enough appeal that most people would use it. I don't agree with most of what I have read Moxie write. But thanks for judging and generalizing by guessing who I must be.
You are right that it's probably more of a social network.
You're irrelevant IN the big picture, at least with that attitude. Defeatism is everywhere and prevents grassroots movements and is the sign of a weak spirit. I refuse that attitude and stick to the merits of a concept, rather than falling back on a logical fallacy like appeal to majority. Stop doing that, because that's how you get subjugated, that's how change is prevented, that is how those in power and influence remain in power and influence. Be the change you want to see.
EDIT: but yes, i was lost, as i thought i was answering to a comment in my inbox, but I did also find @[email protected] mom - and boy did I meet those potatoes, lemme tell ya.
Are you lost?
Naw, I found your mom's room just fine.
You're toeing this weird line between trying to act cool about the honest mistake (editing the post) while also acting like a lil removed that needed to overcompensate for the mistake. (lame mom jokes)
You do you and all, but man that's fragile!! Most people would've just laughed and said "whoops!"
Yeah? I'm not most people.
Ummm...ok then, but in this case your individuality is making you look weak af.
If you say so.
Now do Zuckerberg and Musk
do you agree with this arrest or are you pointing out the double standards ?
I don't really understand how he allowed crime. I can commit crime via sms, whatsapp, signal or mail. Does that mean they allow it?
I think the distinction here is that if your phone provider, WhatsApp, Signal or mail carrier is informed that someone is engaging in illegal activity using their service, these entities would comply and give the information they have on you-- be it a lot like SMS or a little like Signal (phone number, registration date).
In the case of Telegram, they've been informed countless times that specific individuals are engaging in blatantly illegal activity and unlike the previously mentioned entities, Telegram is refusing to comply with any legal requests.
I believe that's the situation but if I'm wrong, by all means correct me because this is a very interesting subject.
Thanks, this is the first explanation that's actually clicked for me.
So to make it clear, it's because their company actually holds some data for clients that these governments want access to - because telegram is not peer-to-peer, unless you set a chat to private.
In essence Telegram as a company holds a lot of data that the French authorities want access to...
This comment brought to you by the Signal gang.
Signal fans are annoying Fuck
Quiet, youngin. I was there when the tracking algorithms that are currently canvasing your stupid ass was made. Listen to your elders.
shut up boomer
Imbecile.
If you want to continue using Signal, you should fight for the right of others to use Telegram. "First they came for them and I said nothing". The EU and others are trying hard to control people's private messaging.
It's not a fight, it's logic. The world governments can do nothing to OpenWhisperSystems (the makers of Signal), because they don't store any communication.
Telegram however thought they were smart, by storing data and splitting that data up in to several different pieces around the world, assuming governments wouldn't collude together to get it.
But they didn't foresee the litigious nature of nation states, and that's what we're seeing now. If these nation states also start to collude with one another, everyone who thought they were safe are gonna get fucked.
Signal does not store any communication data. They only facilitate handshake between clients and the clients manage the data between themselves.
This is why Telegram isn't safe, but Signal is.
They World governments want to ban Signal and make it illegal to use it. That's the problem.
The wOrLd GuBmInTs is such a huge umbrella that it must mean it'll rain the Atlantic Ocean.
WESTERN GOVERNMENTS are allowed to go against privacy and encryption because of stupid Karen's screaming "won't somebody please think of the children" and old fops going "basically terrorists" and not a single one of them have considered the decentralisation principle as an actual barrier, because their constituency allows it, because their constituency is technically illiterate.
EASTERN GOVERNMENTS are largely authoritarian. Sorry, world, but I'm not in the mood to piss about here.
THE GLOBAL SOUTH gets bundled together as well, because no one there has the resources to actually prevent the spread of encryption software, much to the shegrin of western governments, who tried to sanction that shit, but got overridden by people who took a plane ride with aa USB stick.
Again, PGP over email is still unbreakable and can be used as well, incl with private email servers, or even Matrix servers. You don't need Telegram or Signal. The "whose next" problem relies on the idea that you and I are the only people who know of these problems, and that's kind of arrogant.
M'buru Ufufu is on that plane right now, with tons of encryption software on a USB stick, the UN be damned. UMA LELE, UMA LELE~!
Just a side note: PGP doesn't use any form for forward secrecy so if someone gets your keys you are hosed.
Better encryption out there these days.
True, but if you lose your keys you're sort of screwed anyways. But yeah, forward secrecy ftw.
With forward secrecy the keys are destroyed after decryption. The messages then live on your device. If you delete those messages they are gone. Eve (the evil eavesdropper) can not decrypt stored encrypted messages even if they steal your device. The keys rotate and you can not generate previous decryption keys.
Nobody is coming after Signal because nobody uses Signal. Telegram has a user base of almost 1 billion.