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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

> Telegram cooperates with data requests from law enforcements.

It is not that black and white:

AFAIK and IIRC it is more like this:

- yes: Telegram gives data about members of public groups/channels

- no: Telegram does not give out information from closed groups / personal chats, and they go to great lengths to prevent that information from becoming available. We might be sceptical all we want about the custom crypto, but I've seen no credible source that I can think of that have backs you statement except the limited example I gave above.

Happy to learn more though.

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"they go to great lengths to prevent that information from becoming available."

Where's the documentation for this? Without documentation your assumption that there's any security is just blind faith.

Telegram has been sued over and over in many countries for refusing to provide that info, and kept fighting (both legally and technologically - via smart proxy-server rotation, addresses distributed over Apples/Google's push notifications etc.).

Here's the case for Russia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_Telegram_in_Russia (eventually the govt has blocked over 20 million (!) IP addresses, including Google's and Cloudflare's, and that disrupted 30% of the Internet in the country, but the app just kept working fine)

You will notice the same article states they eventually started cooperating with the Russian government, as the other poster noted already.

Schneier was very vocal after the Snowden documents on how the NSA has multiple methods to get hold of the data. If it's not via judicial means, it's via extra-judicial means. NSA considers Telegram's servers outside US fair game (i.e. hacking them is not a problem). GCHQ considers servers inside the US fair game. The two agencies exchange intel which allows them to bypass constitutional protections. This is old news.

As for Russia, China, Israel etc. The servers are outside their borders, and mostly they don't give a flying fuck even if it was domestically hosted.

main opposition leader got poisoned yesterday you think it matters what a russia based organization says they will do?

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