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> you can create multiple accounts

Only if you have multiple phones. One account per number.

> Yeah my texts are probably being read by the FSB. So what? Better that than the NSA, frankly.

I can't tell if this is a joke. If it's not, it's fairly insulting to everyone who believes in a world with privacy and freedom.

If I am living in the USA and the FSB reads my messages, what can they do to me if they don't like what I say?

I personally think the NSA has a jurisdiction to do more to American citizens in the USA. I would be extra careful about the NSA if I was H1B.

I think a better example might be China.

Let's say you say something less than pleasant about China, or you like Winnie the Pooh.

China has already demonstrated the will and influence necessary to extend pressure on other companies, governments, and etc to deal with such things.... and you have far less recourse (if any) to deal with (or know about) it than most anything.

I post this a lot but it's true:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.

But let's also be clear that much like your data being held by a corporation, leaks, etc all happen... if Russia has it, so may someone closer to you.

It’s already been proven that the NSA also surveils on US citizens via PRISM and so on, I think what he’s trying to say is this should be a bigger concern than some foreigners.

Well as my quote indicates I agree.

But I think it is also unhelpful / inaccurate for every non free nation that comes up we get these sort of "What about this place!?!?" false equivalency arguments.

This is indeed exactly what I'm intending to say :)

> what can they do to me if they don't like what I say?

Leave a little nerve agent on your doorknobs.

Based on historical statistics, there's an approximately 5 in 8,000,000,000 chance of this actually happening, and if you've never talked to a Russian in your life, the statistic drops to 2 in 8 billion (those poor souls who were injured accidentally)

30 million dead Ukrainians disagree with your statistic.

That is an inflated statistics of people in the USSR killed by the tyrant of their own country. If anything it supports the point made above.

I am acutely aware of the Holodomor. However those who died in the Holodomor were not killed by nerve agents, they were killed by forced starvation.

that would be the UK government, has nothing to do with the FSB (which is btw ~ FBI of Russia) or NSA.

I think the actual danger to me from either organization is approximately nil. So it makes little sense to rank them this way.

Also the FSB would probably report on you to the US govt anyway, if you were actually up to something big enough that the NSA would have taken interest.

They can blackmail you with any information that came up in your private conversations, that you'd rather keep private.

That is a wild stance indeed. An exercise I can do:

Go to, https://transparency.twitter.com/en/information-operations.h...

Download,

Internet Research Agency (October 2018) - 3613 accounts

Tweet information (1.2GB)

Search,

mytwitterusername

And there it is, Russia's efforts at influencing my account or using it's messaging to influence others. Targeted attempts to get users to click rigged links. Psy-op mind fucking.

Do I really want to give this type of government more data to fuck with me or people in my orbit? Just because "better than NSA," whatever that means?

No I'll pass on that give me privacy from all the alphabet boys please.

I agree with your conclusion. I am simply not sure what an average person can realistically do against a state actor. Right now, I read parent's comment as 'play them against one another in hopes they won't share data'.

> Yeah my texts are probably being read by the FSB. So what? Better that than the NSA

Being funneled to the FSB doesn't prevent them from being read by the NSA, it's just one more opportunity for the NSA to intercept them.

I'd add to that: actually native client, not just some slow Electron thing, you can scale the font in the client(!), easy to work with bot API, allows other clients to access their servers.

The one thing that keeps me from using Telegram as my primary messenger is the low maximum line-width that makes it feel like you're on mobile even if you're using the desktop client. But UX, especially speed, is just amazing.

The native client also has benefits that don't come from electron and a javascript vm, being able to use 9 GB of swap and remaining performant!

More than just one native client, depending your platform, there are multiple clients! So if the official client doesn't do it for you, you've got a choice, and if you're so inclined you could even write your own!

On macOS I use the semi-official Swift/Cocoa client instead of the main Qt-based one.

Other messaging apps wouldn't be so bad if alternative clients were a possibility, because inevitably someone would build better clients. Messaging app platforms should have open APIs and welcome third party client devs, not chase them away.

> The real reason to use telegram is that it's miles away the best messenging program out there.

That, and it's not Facebook-owned, a company which has a very detailed track record of lying and abusing private information.

Telegram as a Messenger/WhatsApp replacement for the general public is solid gold, even if state security agencies were able to peek in it.

It all depends on your threat model for a given information exchange you're going to have and who you consider to be your adversary.

There is no reason to believe telegram is in bed with the FSB.

The company does not have servers in Russia, the software wasn't developed in Russia, etc.

The only reason one could make the connection is that it was developed by a Russian. A Russian that gave up a lot specifically not to cooperate with the Russian government.

> the software wasn't developed in Russia, etc.

But it was developed in Russia. Durov was lying to the world that developers were abroad out of reach of russian authorities, when in practice they were in Saint Petersburg just a floor below VK.com developers (a previous company by Durov, now controlled by russian government via proxy pocket oligarchs)

>by the FSB. So what? Better that than the NSA,

Care to explain?

Would you rather have the cops with jurisdiction over where you live read your mail or have the cops who have jurisdiction over somewhere that has no affect on you read your mail?

He probably lives in the USA where the FSB is less likely to oppress him than US government agencies are.

Hasn't the FSB proven that false? They've been caught poisoning dissenters on foreign soil many times in the past several years.

You need to have really pissed them off for them to poison you, much like how you really need to piss the Department of State off for them to drone strike you, or to throw you in a sack, mark it 'DIPLOMATIC MAIL', and ship you to Gitmo.

Yeah but there's not gonna open that can of worms on a whim whereas if the ATF catches wind of all that fertilizer you bought they're gonna incompetently shoot your dog regardless of the fact that you just want to peacefully break up some boulders into small enough pieces for your tractor to move.

There's a spectrum between the Russian state is willing to risk people, money to kill me, and the Russian state is willing to have local Russian police throw me in prison (or local right wing thugs beat me up) because I'm openly gay ...

Are you a high profile enemy of the Russian state? Probably not. People seriously have a strange idea about how important they are to some intelligence agency. There are billions of messages being sent every day and I guarantee you the FSB or the NSA don't crawl through your grocery list

Every time these discussions come up people sound like they think they're El Chapo or Ai Weiwei in which case yes don't use telegram. If you're an average citizen these agencies couldn't care less what youtube videos you share

This should be a top comment in each Telegram privacy-related post or thread. Everyone is ok, that Google may read their e-mails and has full access to search details, Facebook might read their messages, 3-rd party ad-companies profile them through pixels, but at the same time start complaining, that FSB may read their Telegram messages (not proven btw).

Be careful not to conflate "I don't want them reading my messages." with "I'm worried they will assassinate me in my home country."

Google and Facebook “read” that personal information by algorithms and by robots not by humans (except rare mistakes) to show you better advertisements.

FSB would try to read that information to try to damage the countries, to spy, to steal databases, to hurt people and so on.

If FSB could read private messages of US citizens it would be 1000 times worse than Google or Facebook reading them even accounting for leaks and misuse in G and FB.

G and FB is thousands engineers who love unicorns and rainbows and are extremely offended when the see a person wearing MAGA hat. FSB is men who regularly drink vodka, who are trained kill, who are not allowed to leave Russia, who are constantly told that Russia is surrounded by enemies.

Don’t compare G and FB to FSB.

(I doubt FSB can read Telegram.)

"FSB is men who regularly drink vodka"

And have a pet bear that plays balalayka.

Dissenters? Skripal is a former GRU traitor.

It's a little funny though: living in the US means the FBI needs a warrant to read your messages and the NSA isn't supposed to at all (there was a huge scandal when they did!).

On the other hand, it's the NSA's job to read all the FSB's data. So by using the non-US-based program, you make it easier for the US government to spy on you.

Isn't that one of the reasons for Five Eyes? The NSA isn't supposed to spy domestically but thankfully MI6 can do it for them and vice versa. Problem solved!

We've known for years that the US government doesn't care and has millions of loopholes around it, so in practice the NSA does read your messages.

>Let's be honest the real reason to use Telegram wasn't security

Yet the VERY FIRST feature presented in Telegram's front page is privacy: "Telegram messages are heavily encrypted and can self-destruct."

Heavily encrypted is a complete lie, but people who want privacy don't know that, they will download Telegram thinking it's secure. You're wrong and you're doing harm by spreading claims like that.

>or his advocates) pops up and tells us it's trash and we should all use signal instead.

Yeah, everyone should fight the propaganda machine shilling a really, really dangerous product.

Every time someone recommends Telegram it's due to features, the marketing strategy is clearly "if we can get them hooked on features, they will forget about the fact every feature is designed to spy on them".

>The real reason to use telegram is that it's miles away the best messenging program out there.

Ooh you're one of them. See here's the thing: the features that aren't really private, aren't really features. Telegram is a collection of trojan horses: seemingly useful things that actually hurt you by spying on you. When you measure Telegram's E2EE features against that of Signal's you'll immediately see who has more features. Telegram doesn't even have group messages.

>It's as user friendly as whatsapp while having completely seamless desktop/mobile integration

It doesn't. There is absolutely no desktop mobile integration for anything that's E2EE. For Signal, everything is.

>Then you have all the gravy like cool tools for groupchat admin, channels, and bots of course

No there are no private group chats with any kind of management in Telegram.

>Yeah my texts are probably being read by the FSB. So what?

To me it sounds like you're a privileged person who doesn't have to care about these things. You're not doing anything that will ever rock the boat, so you're pretty much immune. The only real question is, what is your legacy?

Also why did you come here to tell us about your privilege and to list Telegram's dangerous features? Because you're a good Samaritan?

Just want to point out that telegram has the same security model as email. Google can read all your emails. So can microsoft if you use them. NSA can find its way into those companies.

Do you use email despite it's lack of end-to-end encryption? I would bet that 99% of these privacy people still use email.

> Just want to point out that telegram has the same security model as email.

Last time I looked, Gmail or equivalent products didn't allow you to easily end-to-end encrypt your messages without any additional effort.

Telegram by default does not utilize end-to-end encryption. You have to start a secret chat with another user. Both of you need to be online at the same time, and there's no support for secret group chats.

All of that to say, I guarantee the majority of Telegram users aren't utilizing E2E-encryption so the Gmail comparison is valid in that light.

Though my counterpoint would be that privacy advocates likely know how to use PGP and use it to securely communicate with fellow privacy advocates via email.

Let me rephrase -> At worst, telegram is no worse than email in terms of security.

>I would bet that 99% of these privacy people still use email.

The question is, what is email being used for? Communicating with people who we don't have private interaction with? Having academic discussion on mailing lists? That stuff doesn't really require confidentiality.

telegram's link preview is always on and there is no way to turn off, so my phone's screen is always filled with just one or two context, hard to read meaningful text and titles in these busy days. I hope they can let me turn off the preview totally.

also conveniently it's in f-droid

It's also good that Telegram is used by many people who don't care security.

new account created 13 hours ago, ok bud

Using throwaway accounts is a common practice on HN. It's right there in the username.

Joining a conversation with throwaway account to list shill points that encourage people to use a dangerous unencrypted communication tool for everything is anything but acceptable.

> It's as user friendly as whatsapp while having completely seamless desktop/mobile integration (something whatsapp and signal have failed to do)

They failed to do this only because they have a real end-to-end encryption for all chats, unlike Telegram.

Telegram does have E2E encryption if you toggle secret chats, it's just not by default because most users don't care about privacy and just want the cool features.

Explain in technical detail why the cool features (like stickers) can't be implemented with E2EE when Signal is doing that at constant pace?

Telegram doesn't have E2E encryption for groups or Windows/Linux desktop clients, even if you try to toggle something. So your argument is false.

Stickers do work in Telegram secret chat, though. Only animated stickers don't, presumably in order to avoid leaking IPs. But a lot of cool features do work in secret chat.

In 5 years of using telegram, I'm yet to see a person who would initate a secret chat with me. Everyone who loves Telegram hypes how cool it syncs all their messages on all devices, including browsers, yet, being happy of using the most secure end-to-end encrypted messaging. Sad.