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Comment by ghughes | Hacker News Reader

Bingo. The CEO of Telegram likes to spread conspiracy theories that are good for business. In a recent tweet he claimed that Signal is "funded by the US government", [1] citing a ridiculous hit piece on OWS and Moxie. [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024

[2] https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privac...

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Even wikipedia say it's founded by the governement ...

As of October 2016, the project has received an unknown amount of donations from individual sponsors via the Freedom of the Press Foundation.[100] Open Whisper Systems has received grants from the Knight Foundation,[101] the Shuttleworth Foundation,[102] and the Open Technology Fund,[103] a U.S. government funded program that has also supported other privacy projects like the anonymity software Tor and the encrypted instant messaging app Cryptocat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)

Funded by the government != The government has their hands all over it

Even TOR was originally a government funded project

Even "the Internet" was originally a government funded project

and yeah, currently Internet is a spying tool of USA.

It's a spying tool for American corporations far more than it is one for the government.

It's a spying tool for American corporations which is very convenient for the government

And TOR is no longer (was it before, I don't know) a secure tool.

It still gets a large portion of its funding from the USG

And there's lots of Tor posters hung up at USG labs (e.g., https://www.torservers.net/wiki/_media/tor-relay-poster.resi...). I was pretty surprised, at first

Tor has probably saved more than a few CIA agents' lives, not to mention free access to the Internet being a powerful tool for undermining authoritarian regimes.

> Tor has probably saved more than a few CIA agents' lives

Tor's main purpose is to allow agents of US intelligence agencies to communicate back with the home base.

"Giving free access to the Internet being a powerful tool for undermining authoritarian regimes" makes it harder for an adversary to focus solely on intelligence agency agent traffic.

I'm not saying Tor is backdoored or monitored, though it's heavily monitored.

When enjoying the benefits of Tor, it's wise to also remember Tor's main purpose.

Exactly, the government is extremely large and not all the NSA. Sometimes the left hand doesn't know what all the thousands of right hands are doing and can't possibly care.

To some extent that's even true within the NSA.

The internet is a government conspiracy!

The government is a government conspiracy!

...wait.

There's a crazy logic to this that I appreciate.

The tweet he was replying to said: "I've heard various reports from people I trust that Signal is compromised. Any comments/thoughts/reliable rumors?"

With his reply, Durov is implicitly claiming that Signal must be compromised because it received some funding that can be traced back to the US government. This is the same kind of FUD that has often been used to smear Tor in the past (and indeed, the piece he cites describes Tor as "a federal weapons contractor" and "a foreign policy weapon, a soft power cyber weapon").

That fits the profile of a conspiracy theory.

Assume without thinking that conspiracy theory equals false -> you watch too much TV.

Supporting Cryptocat only makes sense if they don't do due diligence or if they're trying to subvert security.

I worked on the OTF-funded security audit of Cryptocat. (The report: https://leastauthority.com/static/publications/LeastAuthorit...) While I wasn't involved in arranging the work, my vague memory is that a publically-disclosed audit was a condition of the funding -- I think the OTF had that policy in general. (It's been a few years, and I haven't kept up.)

Even the author of CryptoCat now thinks you should not use CryptoCat, but I would not rush to assume ill of the OTF funding it back then.

Yes, OWS received funding from the US government via the Open Technology Fund, which is organized under Radio Free Asia.

I assume that "founded" is a typo, but to be clear, there is no evidence that the US government either encouraged the creation of OWS or contributed any actual work/code to OWS.

The conspiracy-theory part here is that taking funding from the US government (any part of the US government, whether the NSA or Radio Free Asia) means that your protocols or your implementations have backdoors, even if those protocols and the source code implementing them are public and well-reviewed.

> Even wikipedia say it's founded by the governement ...

I bet you meant to type "funded".

Most of the funding for the foundation that funds Wikipedia comes from small donations from users.

For all we know, Signal itself could be one big CIA operation. It wouldn't be beyond their capabilities. But at least the protocol and encryption are open source.

Good for business but what business? As far i know he is running telegram using his own money, and he has no businesses plan and he doesn't want one.

Only the telegram server is closed source (for now), telegram client and protocol are open source.

How about a business of selling troves of data to Russian government, for example? The only thing that makes such "business" seem unlikely is trust in Durov. It can be unfounded given his claims like [1]

> No, because I never took money from the government. I left Russia and lost a $3bn business there because I defended users' privacy from it.

while he is often spotted in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Moreover, Telegram's developers themselves sit next door to Vkontakte's (that was allegedly taken from him), so he's hardly dissident.

I believe no Western media tried to look behind his bravado and this saddens me. I'll be happy to help with local sources if someone is interested, though.

[1]: https://twitter.com/durov/status/872902721401237506

Could you provide a little context to your comment?

I'm not well read on this (eg, what company he lost, how he claims he lost it, etc) -- you seem to be responding in the context of a story, but not a story I know about.

You can find a dry summary here [1]. Basically there is a nice story that Durov constructed over the years, the story of a tough libertarian who stood against the Russian government and was forced out of his business (Vkontakte), having to sell it for a fraction of its true price. He stands by his fellow users, willing to risk his business over their privacy, and now he runs Telegram out of his own pocket because… reasons. He is also in (implied) exile from Russia, he bought a citizenship of some island nation and is now a digital nomad.

I believe that's the gist of his "official" image. However, there are cracks in that story to which I alluded in the comment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VK_(social_networking)#2013.E2...

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