FBI document shows what data can be obtained from encrypted messaging apps

The point of E2EE messengers is to prevent casual mass surveillance and to increase the cost & risk of mass and targeted surveillance. It's about increasing the noise floor of the internet and making everyone more safe as a result. It forces adversaries to use more legal mechanisms to improve your rights. It's about making you expensive to attack, much like afghanistan won the wars against the USSR and the USA by being expensive as fuck to attack while cheap to attack on their side. They're not about secure endpoints, which is a separate issue that can be worked on in parallel.

So yes, you should make sure if your threat model cost benefit says you should:

* You have a secure keyboard mechanism. No third party keyboard apps, used a wired / built in keyboard.

* You use a secure OS and keep up to date. You verify updates are public and not made 'just for you', you turn off auto updates.

* You watch the network behavior of your devices with external proxy devices to see if anything weird is happening, you filter out network interactions you don't like, use a VPN with the proxy device and so on.

The more you use 0days, the more they get noticed and the more likely you are to burn them, so you've just increased the stakes towards surveilling you. Now the minimum standard to make you a person of interest has increased significantly, reducing the probability of it.

That's defeatist thinking. Just because some agencies of major governments can break into many devices doesn't necessarily mean they do.

And there are other threats you'll want to defend from as well, including governments and agencies with smaller budget.

Anyway, if endpoint security is part of your threat model, you'll be pleased to know I've spent the past decade looking into how to address the problem https://github.com/maqp/tfc

Or even if they did build the software, anything running on hardware they don’t have a similar level of knowledge about. Which good luck with that.

Which leaves anyone planning on doing something the US gov’t (or China, or Russia if within their reach) wouldn’t like left with some unpalatable and inefficient options.

Either they blend in enough to not get any attention, or don’t seem “dangerous” enough in the sense they are likely to get anywhere, or don’t use any technology more complicated than a piece of paper and a #2 pencil.

The last one was what osama bin laden was doing, and they still found him - it just took awhile.

As long as the folks being targeted are legitimately out to do harm against innocents, these capabilities are ‘ok’ (scare quotes intentional here).

They’re going to be turned against political opponents or people that just seem ‘bad’ though at some point, and almost certainly already have been for years.

Don't get me wrong, I use Telegram every day despite their flaws. Their data security guarantees may be terrible, but their user experience is still outstanding. It's a testament to how good a chat ecosystem can be if you don't rely on Electron.

I have no reason to distrust the Telegram team, but the data model is simply not designed to keep messages secret. It's Telegram's biggest shortcoming, in my opinion. Things like channels don't need encryption, but group chats can use some WhatsApp-style crypto.

WhatsApp's UX (basically: trust all E2E keys, and show a little notification if the keys changed) makes E2E available to the common smartphone user without the hassle of say Matrix's manual verification. For those with a more security-oriented mindset, there's always the ability to show encryption status changes so you could investigate.

I'll probably be using Telegram for a few years despite its shortcomings. It feels a bit iffy to talk about sensitive personal matters through Telegram, but I know it'll be a while before I can convince any large group of friends to move to something more secure.

For now I'm bridging my Telegram accounts through Matrix, so it's not like I'd benefit much from the added security anyway.

> They also say openly that they cooperate with everyone to take down certain illegal material from channels and open groups.

Can you provide a link for that? I could only find that they'd hand over your personal account info if they get a court order claiming that you're a terror suspect (from https://telegram.org/privacy):

> 8.3. Law Enforcement Authorities

> If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you're a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened. When it does, we will include it in a semiannual transparency report published at: https://t.me/transparency.

You're right! Despite their weird custom protocol, their E2E chats are still considered completely safe to use.

In my experience, though, very few people use E2E chats, even in direct chats.

As someone who regularly defend Telegram against all kinds of nonsense: you got it exactly right : )

> Or if they hack Telegram's servers

Or they join the group chat

I’m curious how you think the US law enforcement agencies would compel Telegram to comply.

Encrypting messages for one person to read is relatively simple. Encrypting a message so that it can be read by multiple parties requires either sending multiple messages or agreeing a stable shared secret for the group chat. If you want to add/drop people from group seamlessly, while keeping everything encrypted, your app or your users will have to jump through lots of hoops. Most don't make the effort.

The surface area for trust is expanded significantly.

Here in Puerto Rico we made our governor quit over exposed chat logs from a Telegram group. Encryption wouldn’t have saved it: someone took screenshots and leaked them to press.

I does have, it is well known and it has existed for years.

The remaining criticism now is that the default for one-on-one chats is still the more convenient normal point-to-point-encrypted chat type instead of E2E-encrypted (which, in Telegrams implementation is less convenient since it doesn't sync between clients, which again is reasonably for those messages where one really cares about secrecy in the context of day-to-day messaging apps).

As usual: I only observe this from the outside. For what I know maybe Putin reads my messages before he goes to bed every night to fall asleep because I mostly use ordinary point-to-point encrypted messages which can be intercepted if Telegram is a secret FSB front or if Telegram isn't careful. Note however that for all we know maybe Biden reads my mail too to fall asleep since that too isn't end-to-end encrypted.

I only comment on observable facts or statements that haven't been debunked. The last means I haven't verified the crypto of any app, I take it for granted that if it is broken someone will figure out just like when WhatsApp sent plaintext messages over port 443, and even faster with Telegram since there are so many who wants to find flaws in it.

>So yeah, it's virtually public.

Let's stop saying that as it implies users are somehow aware the service provider has access to the content, and that they make an informed decisions wrt their privacy.

>Even your private messages only require you to enter an SMS code to view, so anyone that can intercept an SMS sent to you, can read your messages.

The 2FA password is something everyone should enable. It's still an incremental security improvement if you have to use Telegram and your threatmodel is a banana dictatorship doing SMS interception but not server-side hacking.

The right thing to do is get yourself and your loved ones the hell out of Telegram as soon as possible; Signal is your best bet here. Cwtch/Briar if you need to also protect metadata.

> How would we know Telegram isn't an FSB front

As a Canadian talking to Canadians in Canada, I hope it’s an FSB front. They seem like my most secure option.

Thanks for the correction. The point stands.

>Telegram moved out of Russia precisely so they wouldn't be under their influence

Yes, because if you're an FSB operation, the rule #1 is to operate from Russia, that way nobody suspects you.

>moved to Dubai

Yet journalists who went there only found an empty office https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg8mWJUM7x4

Telegram is influenced by FB of Russian VK (something like that). And VK has KGB tights. This is from Ukraine activists point of view just FYI. So your choices is Signal or Wire. Signal sever is in US, and Wire may or may not be in US. So there you go.