Telegram group chats are very much available to law enforcement if they can convince Telegram to hand over the data.
It could also be that Telegram (and any other foreign chat company) is more reluctant to (and more difficult to force to) share data with the FBI.
> Telegram group chats are very much available to law enforcement if they can convince Telegram to hand over the data.
Telegram public channels and groups are open, including for law enforcement. They also say openly that they cooperate with everyone to take down certain illegal material from channels and open groups.
Telegram claimed as late as a few months ago - and nobody has proven otherwise in any form as far as I can see - that not a byte of their users private data (i.e. not on open groups or channels) have been handed over to any government.
I cannot prove this and also I'm getting more careful with Telegram these days (this might come as a surprise for some of you who know my history of defending Telegram) but I still think
1. if it was possibly to prove something else there are enough Telegram haters just on HN to make sure to leak it
2. just to be clear I still think it is a very good alternative for friend-to-friend-communication, group communication etc, I'm just looking for alternatives as I go forward, and also I am worried when I see police using it at work.
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.
Maybe I can:
First a note: "your personal account info" while somewhat correct makes it sound broader than what the paragraph below says: "your IP address and phone number".
That said, here is one that that at least partially confirms this:
From https://money.cnn.com/2015/11/18/technology/telegram-isis-sh... :
> "Our mission is to provide a secure means of communication that works everywhere on the planet. In order to do that...we have to process legitimate requests to take down illegal public content (sticker sets, bots, and channels) within the app."
(emphasis mine)
There seems to be more in the search results here (if you have access to kagi, if not apply now:)
https://kagi.com/search?q=telegram+takes+down+isis+groups+
Edit: here's another link from the first page of results in kagi: https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2015/11/19/telegram-...
Another after I added "cooperate" to my query: https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/euro...
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.
In my experience, though, very few people use E2E chats, even in direct chats.
Or if they hack Telegram's servers. Or ask some other agency like the NSA (that hacks systems all the time) to do that for them.
As for the legal aspects, I'm fairly sure Telegram can be made to comply, no individual user's is worth losing (tens/hundreds of) millions of customers in that particular country. It's not like Telegram can't do that technically*, the server-side database encryption key is by definition in the RAM of the server system.
* That hasn't prevented them from actively misleading customers with their split-key-and store-parts-under-multiple-jurisdictions -scheme.
Or they join the group chat
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.