I would guess this means the gov't now has access to Telegram messages, one way or another.
Sadly I feel like that is a very real possibility for any software / hardware produced in any significantly non free country.
It can happen in other countries, but the likelihood of you hearing about it seems much much higher.
It's a sad situation as I don't like the idea of being suspicious by default of other developers / products simply because their country of origin, but I have trouble avoiding the obvious fact that even a well meaning developer / company based in those countries would / could easily be pressured into introducing some sort of access (doesn't matter how) and it's simply unlikely we'd know.
I wonder if the money Crypto AG made will have been worth any future reputation cost for Zug's economy.
https://www.luzernerzeitung.ch/wirtschaft/bund-stoppt-nachfo... "... verkaufte die Crypto AG im Auftrag des US-Geheimdienstes CIA und des deutschen Bundesnachrichtendienstes Jahrzehnte lang manipulierte Chiffriergeräte an diverse Staaten."
I don't believe any country means all countries are equivalent as far as the risks go.
The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations.
Why? Bureaucracy, Intelligence Services and state-level paranoia transcends political ideologies and systems.
> The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations.
On the other hand, we'd hear a lot more about anything from Moscow in our media, so I doubt there's a lot to be talked about as of now. It's only one big leak away, of course, but so far, I don't see a lot of support for your theory.
If China comes to you and tells you to hand over the keys, you don't go to court or the news media ... in the west you can actually refuse and we see that happen and play out in the courts and etc.
Not in less free countries.
It seems like you're holding all nations to be equal if there isn't perfection. I think that's a poor way to measure anything involving people.
The Snowden of China doesn't get his day in court, maybe never talked if his family back home was at risk.
Russia literally had court proceedings about Telegram, which this post is about. Is Russia not a "less free country"? Or are those not "real court cases" while "ours" are totally real (but you can't talk about them and must play charades, and the opposing side has super powers written into the law)? If you need help carrying those goal posts, let me know.
> The Snowden of China doesn't get his day in court, maybe never talked if his family back home was at risk.
Neither does the Snowden of the US of A, you know, that one guy... right, Snowden, who has to hide in Russia of all places to not get shipped off to Gitmo. And even if he took that route, I'm sure the apologists would say "well, this is one of those small imperfections but he's fortunate that he's not in Russia".
His choice to not do so is understandable, but it's an option.
I'm a little lost on what you're saying at this point. I can't imagine you or I want to get into the judicial differences between the US and Russia.
In that context, in a post-Snowden world, it's kinda grating to still have people talk about all the evil things that supposedly happen in "non free countries", while mostly being completely unaware about what their own, supposedly "free", countries are doing, often on a global scale because they are supposedly way more likely to "hear" about it, while still not being able to change anything about it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine
[2] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html
It's fairly obvious that more free countries allow for a greater chance in changes of law than non free countries.
The Snowden of China would not get his day in court....
Because the Snowden of the US did?
I don't think the Snowden of China gets such an option.
If they caught him, he would not have been able to properly defend himself because US law would prohibit him from making his case [2].
Heck, if they would have caught him before his Hong Kong meeting, they could simply have "vanished" him and nobody would have been any the wiser, as Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill would have had a very difficult time proving the legitimacy of the leaked documents.
So no, neither the Snowden of the US, nor of China gets any of these options, that's why this whole false dichotomy of "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war.
The best chance whistleblowers like that have is trying to escape the sphere of influence of whoever they blew the whistle on. For Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and others that's large parts of the world they will be welcomed in, for US whistleblowers it's pretty much only a handful of countries out of whom only a very few are actually able to keep them save/not straight up hand them over.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/05/edward-snowd...
[2] https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/wsj-op-ed-why-edward-s...
There's a whole world of talk of Snowden and others supposedly going to be vanished and it for whatever reason the fact that it hasn't happened seems entirely lost on folks who talk about it.
> "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war.
I don't know what you're trying to say about that. I think there are real differences between freedoms allowed in different nations and they have real impacts.
If I were him, I, uh, would not try my hand in a court of law.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jun/01/julian-assange...
Not sure he'd get the same type of trail in China, Russia, or if it would go that far.
The mob has sent hitment to people whose offences were way lesser than that.
Their ways are unyielding, and uncompromising. Putin has a record killing people who grieved him more than a decade ago, keeping trying for years on end. People he killed some times survived 2-3, even 4, assassination attempts over years, just to be eventually killed by yet another one.
Knowing that, it's hard to explain how Telegram kept maintaining an office in Russia.
Telegram has an office in Russia? Do you have sources? I cannot find one to confirm, and as far as I know that's not the case.
It is a good example of "he said she said". But Igor Ashmanov considers Rosenberg a good source on Durov brothers and lets say information above is correct.
That means that Durov is used a part of the real estate he had access to to help development of Telegram. It does not mean that Durov is (not) affiliated with Russian government it just means that for Durov it is useful to use Russian real estate he knows and adores and to use Russian talent.
It looks like Telegram servers are somewhere in Europe, BTW.
I think you are talking about Clinton Foundation, aren't you? A joke, of course.
Can you help me to access statistics from which you inferred "double digit portion"?
Not that I am pro-Russian-government, I am not. I just sense here something that is not completely right with my view of the world and I want to get better in that regard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_...
https://www.rferl.org/a/nemtsov-murder-russia-political-kill...
Going by exemplar logic in your answer to gdy above, you are either paid by, say, Navalny or you are a troll. Okay then.
Is it Nemtsov "an audacious opposition" in your opinion? As much as I don't like the Putin rule, Nemtsov popularity was really minor to influence anything. If anything it was the "non-systematic opposition" who won most from his death.
There's absolutely no point in making any physical moves against Durov even if he was openly anti-Putin and supported opposition in any way. It's never done like that. He's already forced out of the country and is not considered a direct threat. He or his remaining actives may be considered a future asset, on the other hand.
This implies he does not support opposition in any way. This is not true. He does support opposition rallies—when they are held to support his cause, true, but such is political climate in Russia that publically supporting those who vocally oppose the state policy is a domain for very few and quite brave.
When Libertarian Party of Russia was organizing a rally in 2017 to protest Telegram ban, Durov contacted the Party himself. (I'm a member of LP RU.)
I don't count on Telegram security but Durov's public image and actions are certainly noticeable and appreciated by opposition.
It implied just that I don't know for sure and it does not change a lot. Even Khodorkovsky is not considered a threat worthy of eliminating - he much better serves the cause being a propaganda target. Durov has even more to offer to Russian gov't (digital technology is the new arms race) so he has even lesser chance of bodily harm.
Russia's leadership is not monolithic, and it's decisions are not rational. Some critics are killed even though they do not pose a significant threat. Some are able to continue their fight. Some have allies on the inside; some are said to actually be controlled by the government.
If anything, history of such politics teaches me that it's chaos all the way down and almost no one has the full picture, neither knows what he's doing.
There are very much parts of the Russian political elite that will use violent and coercive means outside their official mandate to silence individuals. Roskomnadzor isn't really one of those, and is mostly limited to spewing more things onto blocklists to the chagrin of ISPs and people who actually understand the internet.
More likely Telegram is unblocked because someone higher-up finally got around to telling Roskomnadzor to fuck off and stop being a nuisance here, since its order never succeeded in actually blocking Telegram and mostly served to disrupt access to cloud service providers (breaking other, non-Telegram applications) as RKN ineffectually tried to issue block orders for entire AWS and GCP network ranges. Other parts of the government clearly didn't care much about the order (they continued to use Telegram for official business after the block), and it seems like it was either RKN attempting to flex its muscles to impress higher-ups or an unsuccessful attempt to put pressure on Telegram that the government has finally given up on.
All that while having open-source and much safer alternatives. I don't see a problem here.
One justification for sharing keys could be that security services want to use data recorded by SORM (and nowadays we also have the goddamn Yarovaya law) as an evidence and to do that you have decrypt it. Luckily for us modern security frameworks are built around ephemeral keys and forward secrecy.
How? As far as I understand by having the client download encrypted messages from one Telegram server and keys from another and then place those servers in different datacenters in different jurisdictions.
FTR: of course I am aware that unlike E2E-encrypted messaging in this case you have to trust the vendor. If you do is up to you. I trust them more than WhatsApp (who are E2E-encrypted but backup to NSA^HGoogle and try to extract all kinds of metadata) and less than Signal (even though Signal has had at least one horribly security glitch).
One more thing: Telegram are also pretty open on the fact that they take down public terrorist content.
People, who used Telegram did not stop using it since the very first day of official ban.
They never needed those keys however, they've always had the capability to hack the server.
However, the effort of setting this up could be better spent on making (or contributing to) a messaging app that's open-source and secure by design, where you don't need such setups to detect backdoors because they are near-impossible to introduce (open-source code and lack of a central server).
1. Hack the server
2. Read every dissident groups' messages.
3. No step 3.