The head of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has been charged by the French judiciary for allegedly allowing criminal activity on the messaging app but avoided jail with a €5m bail.
The Russian-born multi-billionaire, who has French citizenship, was granted release on condition that he report to a police station twice a week and remain in France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement.
The charges against Durov include complicity in the spread of sexual images of children and a litany of other alleged violations on the messaging app.
His surprise arrest has put a spotlight on the criminal liability of Telegram, the popular app with around 1 billion users, and has sparked debate over free speech and government censorship.
Telegram has no end to end encryption by default.
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).
And telegrams e2ee destroys all cool features it originally had
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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.
Assuming things should work that way is ignorant. According to you, service owners should design and redesign their services to not store any data in order to avoid arrests. Also that a service owner should invent stuff they might not had a plan for if they have even a theoretical possibility to help identify individual users, in other words go against policies they designed at some point.
Assuming things should work that way is ignorant. According to you, service owners should design and redesign their services to not store any data in order to avoid arrests.
If they don’t want to be arrested yes, they should either do that or have good enough moderation to not get in the bad graces of some big entities like countries.
I’m not sure what you meant with the rest of your comment.
I mean the basic logic of the service was designed somewhere before its release. Data policies, promises to users are nothing if you assume services should adapt to stuff like this, at the expense of breaking those policies and promises.
Here is an old article from telegram about reasons for how it works https://telegra.ph/Why-Isnt-Telegram-End-to-End-Encrypted-by-Default-08-14
The thing is I think he did think of stuff like this.
From what the article says and from what I knew. Telegram purposefuly made “distributed cross-jurisdictional encrypted cloud storage” to try and evade governments. So he did have them in mind.
If we lived in a world where we didn’t have to think about governments spying on us, we might have not even needed encryption to begin with.But thank you for the link, it was an interesting read even if I don’t agree with what he’s trying to convey / prove.
After reading the article and the links in the article, I’m not seeing anywhere where they stated the chats there requesting information on were public chats, did you have a source that discussed that I could read up on? It sounds fairly interesting to me.
No, just personal experience (I use telegram for many years) and absence of server data implications anywhere across the issues in the past (at this time too). You can find questionable or illegal businesses in telegram with a few words, they are all public channels. Hence “no moderation” accuses mentioned in every article.
There are of course darknet-like private communities, but I assume they are not a subject of interest at this time. Authorities would need to dig very deep past all the obvious illegal stuff, and telegram shouldn’t care about resources consumed by such a small chunk of user base. Those groups will stay, as they are, private and safe, I assume, for quite some time.
Not to whatabout it but under this logic we got other "CEO"s who should see a similar treatment.
Will they?
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bootlicker much? would you also be excited if Russia arrests Proton CEO for dubious reasons or is your reasoning based on ideology and tribalism?
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@NegativeInf @scorp if your logic holds then why haven’t landline providers, Gmail, AOL, and ther companies come under the same scrutiny? The fact is all technology can and will be used outside of intended design.
Because they cooperate with authorities? Your phone line info, your email, your Facebook? It’s all a subpoena or search warrant away.
Part of this arrest was due to management not cooperating with the government in the government trying to police dangerous content.
Is that the point here? Telegram is not a messaging app, it have that functionality but it does not revolve around that. And there is e2ee if you enable it. Thanks
But Telegram IS a messaging app? Their motto is literally “a new era of messaging”.
Yes, but it’s not it’s only functionality, unlike signal. Also how is durovs arrest can be justified by saying “telegram aint e2ee”? Signal bros are something else.
I’m just calling out your phrase saying that Telegram is not a messaging app, when it is. That is all.
Also how is durovs arrest can be justified by saying “telegram aint e2ee”?
No one here has said or implied that.
And none for group chats.
Now do Zuckerberg and Musk
Don’t leave out Spez.
Meta is literally ad platform for scam. But it’s american, so it’s ok.
It’s the same shit. I was advertised psylocibin shit on facebook before.
The problem is that those guys comply with the requests from governments.
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 can commit crime via sms, whatsapp, signal or mail.
But you’re not allowed to
Crime is generally illegal
Against the law at the minimum.
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.
Presumably Moxie as well since I’m constantly being told that Signal is the most secure e2ee platform.
Telegram holds the keys, Signal doesn’t
That’s right, Signal only holds phone numbers for some unspecified reason.
Not the place
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.
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.
Even better: tell people about Briar. It isn’t for everyone but if people are really concerned it is the right answer. Briar has issues with convenience but that can be mitigated somewhat.
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Nobody is coming after Signal because nobody uses Signal. Telegram has a user base of almost 1 billion.
I think Signal is liked by the US government. I doubt it would be targeted. Also the US has laws protecting platforms.
Yeah. A lot of people use Facebook and TikTok too, yet here we are on Lemmy. How many users are there here?
I love lemmy, but it’s irrelevant on the big picture. Same with Signal.
Telegrams moderation leaves a lot to be desired. I’m not saying they should look into or give governments people’s private conversations but I am saying that certain public features of telegram that do allow you to report illegal materials have been used to spread them.
certain public features of telegram that do allow you to report illegal materials have been used to spread them.
I don’t understand, what do you mean? Does clicking “report” on a message not simply send a report to moderators only?
I’m saying that Telegram’s moderators are not moderating stuff they should be moderating and that they have admitted they should be moderating. I know that it’s not their fault, it’s the small size of the team compared to almost a billion monthly active users, but still.
I know that it’s not their fault, it’s the small size of the team
This part is directly Telegram’s fault. If they cannot keep up with their moderation queue then they need a bigger moderation team. Preferably properly remunerated. There are news reports about how Facebook’s sub-contracted moderators work for these extremely shitty companies who track them based on how many reviews a minute they do, and which causes extreme psychological damage to the workers both because of the extreme content they have to see as part of their jobs and the bad working conditions they must put up with.
Yes, basically every corporate social media site needs more moderators. A single person can barely moderate 200K users (cohost), so a platform with 900 million should probably have a trust and safety team larger than 30 or 60 (Durov didn’t confirm it).
I do wonder how much “report” does.
Next up: Discord!
Pretty sure Discord keeps tons of data on their users and readily complies with warrants.
I mean, they shut down tons of Yuzu and Yuzu clone discord servers for Nintendo.
I think they’re already in the good graces of those kind of folks.
Discord does not have this problem. Source: the US government and the issue of massive security breaches by people arguing in some discord chat
It is funny that his bail was a small fraction of his wealth. This situation is tense and uncertain but at least there is something funny about it.
Elder millennial, you little brat.
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 @MeetInPotatoes@lemmy.ml 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.
