Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister
reuters.com
reuters.com
It's hilarious to watch both praising and bashing Telegram in the same evening news, and how no journalist seems to care.
Can you give me a date to look for an example in? I haven't see that yet.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/telegram-verfassungsschutz-... „Radicalized Corona Deniers What can the state do about Telegram? Corona deniers use the Telegram messenger service to let their fantasies of violence run free. The state wants to take action against it. The new interior minister is facing a mammoth task.“
https://www.tagesschau.de/regional/nordrheinwestfalen/wdr-st... „North Rhine-Westphalia State security investigates corona demos: anti-Semitism in Telegram chats At a demonstration against the Corona measures in Kamp-Lintfort, a participant is said to have shown the Hitler salute on Tuesday. The Duisburg State Security is now investigating. The Duisburg State Security is investigating in the vicinity of the demonstrators who demonstrate as self-proclaimed "walkers" against the corona policy. The allegations are massive: It is about anti-Semitic hate speech. The focus is on chat groups that run via the "Telegram" service. The demonstrations are planned there.“
https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/br-recherche/querdenk... „MAD is investigating two other soldiers Investigations are currently underway against at least two other Bundeswehr soldiers because they made radical statements against corona measures. Research by BR and tagesschau.de revealed this . One should pay close attention to the choice of words, according to a mountain hunter in a more than seven-minute voice message published on the Telegram messenger platform in December last year. The Bundeswehr is a "company" in which everything is done to "destroy us patriots who are trapped in the Bundeswehr". What is meant is the obligation to enforce corona vaccinations for soldiers.“
At least last bit isn't just journalists making up stuff. I saw "queerdenker" stickers in my city giving a telegram link, which curious as I am checked out, and one of the first things I saw was somebody sharing a list of "Volksverräter" ("traitors to the people") followed by a lot of "hang them" comments by other people.
I distinctly remember one person commenting that he had already sent a letter to one of the politicians containing a "Hinrichtungsbefehl" (order for execution) he cobbled together, of which he posted a screenshot. It was single page letter meant to look "official" that listed "crimes" (such as treason) the politician was supposed to have committed, and concluded that therefore the politician was to be hanged or executed by a firing squad (choice of the politician, isn't that nice? :P). The consensus of people in that group replying to that guy was that the letter was a good one, with some suggestions on how to improve it in the future.
The group and the list in the chat history were still up a week later, so neither the group moderators nor telegram removed it.
To ramble about something means to talk about it in a confused way. If you find something specific confusing about the way the parent comment talks about "freedoms", maybe you should point that out. (Of course the parent comment doesn't talk about "freedoms" at all, confused or not.)
Not everybody in the world wants to be the one who decides what is extreme or mainstream.
He fears to be silenced and ostracized or that his right to free speech will be suppressed.
That all because there could be a possibility that a for-profit company gets forbidden that is not complying with the laws of the country it itself is operating in. This is rambling.
One of the most important values in German politics is the concept of "wehrhafte Demokratie"[1], essentially, the idea that Germany can't ever again let the democratic system be defeated by populists, even a majority.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany
[2]: Personally, I'm not a fan of having underpaid teams of "content moderators" in charge of deciding what constitutes acceptable public discourse precisely because there's insufficient democratic oversight. It's also a horrible, psychologically taxing job. It's a hard problem that won't be solved by ignoring it.
Oh wait I know you yourself know nothing about this situation.
Oh wait you yourself never got death threats to your personal mail and home?
Oh wait its not like the article is saying that closing it would be the last resort...
Which are all important points.
And again Telegram is breaking german/eu law and they are ignoring it even if they get a letter.
To the government exerting control over it's citizens is far more important than protecting it's citizens rights and well-being. Facebook knows that and just play the game and at the end of the day Zuckerberg can do whatever he want if he saves politicians faces.
Its not about "querdenker" putting there bullshit on and promoting there products.
It's about the far right and people are getting more aggressive every day and writing death threats and leaking addresses and a lot of nasty shit.
It's not about selling your homeopathic sugar pills. It's not about stupid people spreading fake news. It's about people calling other people to kill other people.
If you dont recognize this then your a
In order to institute fascism, Hitler needed a crumbling economy, not an encrypted messenger!!!
Will they also shut down email, I'm sure a lot of death threats are sent via that?
Even if a few crazy people are into such things, it doesn't mean they have a huge impact. You can use Telegram just fine without ever seeing anything of it.
Think about it … you wouldn’t get SPAM emails and calls or DDOS atacks if you only gave out capabilities to contact you to your existing contacts, and gave close contacts the ability to refer people to you, and if one friend abused their capability of handing out such invites, then you invalidate all their future invites.
Same with the mail. Why should people easily know your address? Oh yeah… because it is published on some LARGE CENTRALIZED SITE UNENCRYPTED. Okay, so if unencrypted information about hard-to-change things such as your physical address gets out, then yes it is game over since geographic coordinates are static and moving is expensive.
But online, this is not the case. The neywork can remap things periodically. Or you can just rejoin at a different address / number and update all your contacts (except the traitors lol).
Look, the country’s post office could even have such an addressing scheme that shifts the internal addresses and maps to physical addresses only on a need to know basis for physical mail delivery. And again… who delivers your mail? A CENTRALIZED mail service? If you had couriers employed by many private companies, you’d just give them info on a need to know basis yourself, and they woild have a hard time combining it into one giant database.
You see, most of the time some DDOS attack happens on a person or website it is because somewhere, some giant centralized site published your address on some centralized routing scheme.
And taking it further … most wars and large scale violence happens because people joined forces to attack some other group of people. Ultimately that is what we have to solve, to make it exponentially harder to organize large groups for “unapproved” uses (there can be a whitelist of approved uses such as 1. agreeing on industrial standards, and 2. saving the world from a threat, whether a virus, an asteroid, rising seas or whatever).
If you’re trying to join forces for anything else, you’re probably doing it at the expense of others and they will join forces too (eg cartels of doctors vs single payer health insurance).
People need to join forces to organise labour unions to have any equal negotiating power against their employer.
People not being allowed to organise is the wet dream of corrupt autocratic politicians and business owners around the world (which is also why China or Russia have such tight controls and surveillance over their respective messaging app ecosystems).
Do you see the issue here? It just escalates further.
“Russia” and “China” are entire countries with massively centralized governments and decision making. At that point your best bet is to decentralize decision making to “democracy” — good luck w that.
To leak their addresses? Yes. To call on killing them? No.
Knowing where your elected (and/or unelected) officials live is very useful for civic purposes. It helps to identify various forms of corruption.
Case in point: when I lived in Finland, our local municipality had 6 snowploughs. Only five of them were ever really in used for clearing out roads. During the long winters, the last one was essentially parked, with a person inside, next to a particular neighbourhood. It only cleared out the roads in that neighbourhood, and the roads directly connecting to it. That neighbourhood housed the chair and two other members of the town council.
Being able to associate uneven allocation of public funds and the home addresses of those deciding how the allocation is done is useful, and I claim, even necessary.
Privacy is a human right, leaking someone address is not ok, and doing so is illegal in Germany because of privacy rights.
Ironically, this is also why it would be illegal in Germany for the government to "close" Telegram.
However, there are many other laws that must be obeyed, and Telegram doesn't obey most of them in Germany, so it can be closed due to those issues.
When you enter politics, you are either doing that to defraud people, or planning to do so at the first opportunity.
People have the right to organize themselves, regardless of their political views, whether it is a telegram group about organizing a school festival, or demonstration about a topic you agree or not agree about.
You can also ask to ban phones because people can use them to organize a murder. Or ban a postal service, since postal mail can also be used for bad purpose.
Perhaps some would say "Ah but it's possible to intercept and open someone's mail, and that's the difference!"
Probably with a warrant an individual's mail can be intercepted, but if the letter inside were written in code, then tbats as far as that goes. It's not up to the postal service to break the code or prevent communication in code. It's impossible anyway since code doesn't have to look like code.
In this case maybe Telegram is like if the postal service also wrote the code but really the code is more like the envelope. The a alogies get fuzzy of course. Is the envelope maybe really tcp/ip? or is that the road? Or is the road the fiberoptic cable?
You have to go back to just examining the essential facts and implications:
It has never been illegal to send a letter with envelopes that block light or expose tampering, and has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code. Anyone could write an impossible law, but it would still be impossible. Any communication at all no matter what it looks like, could be code.
So there is no defensible/actionable way to have a problem with either a letter carrier, or the act of writing a letter in code. And those are the two things Telegram does or facilitates, and so do countless other services and channels.
This is a very sweeping statement that is false for lots of places and times; while Germany is at the supportive end of encryption various other EU countries have mandatory key disclosure to law enforcement. Even in the US it's illegal to make encrypted radio transmissions on certain bands.
It is a poor argument to make the it would be impossible for Germany to criminalize encrypted communication. They can do it, even if it would be ineffective and widely subverted.
If you write a letter, and there is no way to prove that it is in code, or not in code, then there is no way to make it either explicitly legal or explicitly illegal. You could only do so arbitrarily which is invalid.
I already acknowledged that this does not stop anyone from writing a law that says anything. But it's the same as writing a law that pi is 3 from now on.
The sweeping appearance is irrelevant.
There's a difference between the right for you and a few others to set up a group when you already know each other, and the right for you to search for those others by interest.
Technically: Private groups are different from groups that are publicly searchable by or or more of name/blurb/message content.
If I did it with an email address, would they ban email? :)
I think we can all admit that end to end encrypted messaging is a thorny problem as far as police work is concerned.
Look, when it comes to SMS and craigslist-style things etc. I bet they will want to just keep them up so they can act as a dragnet for the fools who use them to organize criminal activity.
I started saying anyone can have anonymity and plausible deniability after they post their private keys publicly online :)
if those stickers contained email address rather than telegram channel then would we consider banning email services? Blocking Telegram because it is being used for drugs is absurd. Telegram is a messenger and if people are using it for drugs then what do you expect Telegram to do?
It also doesn't help when Telegram doesnt act on laws being broken on their platform as well as being out of reach and effectively evading jurisdiction.
Also: My guess is that moderation is worse for non-english content. Just search via the "users and groups nearby" feature and you'll find drugs, prostitution, racist groups, vaccination certificate "services", covid denial groups and so on. It's a cesspool of shady stuff you won't find that easily on other messengers. Addendum: the 1.5gb-per-file file-sharing feature is also frequently used for piracy. There's PDF bots for serving NYT paywalled content and so on.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
A bad actor that wants to hobble free speech and communication could flood a system with illegal, antisemitic speech, and then turn around and use that speech that they are spreading as a justification to have the communication platform taken down.
A lot of these people who think they are very edgy, critical and radical are just being played by the establishment.
Yeah, the German police/state is not new to this. There are always reports that the German police in plain clothes infiltrate protest groups and start throwing rocks at the riot police in uniforms, in order to justify police intervention by force to break up the protest.
Only one Telegram feature is mentioned in the source documents I've read, namely public searchable groups. I've heard that people in the ministries and agencies worry that nazis can recruit e.g. by searching for groups where people worry about this or that threat to nature, then joining and gradually trying to turn conversation towards threats to the Homeland. That kind of thing.
A communication platform doesn't have to have that. Signal has groups, but you can't search for and join a group except by knowing a person in the group. Facebok has groups too, and some of those are (rumour has it) used/mentioned like the Telegram ones.
I don't understand why the general media talk about "encrypted messenger service" when the source documents focus on a single feature that is essentially unencrypted, because public and searchable.
When the media is used as propaganda - surely this has never happened before?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Telegram...
The exact message you see is "Unfortunately, this channel couldn't be displayed on your device.". It doesn't say anything about the app store because apple policies don't allow apps to say that contents are censored because of apple guidelines.
These same channels survive on Android so far.
As another comment says, I could compile it myself, but that is hard for someone with no expertise. Not to mention that I wouldn't trust an IPA that someone else put out. It's better if telegram themselves built and host that IPA file.
Yes, they get signed with my own self-generated key.
However, to compensate, there's now encrypted SNI, so the situation is returning back to the 2018 one.
Most Android users probably don't sideload apps at the moment. Telegram is a vital communication tool for the Querdenker (antivax) movement as well as far-right extremist groups. Extremely motivated extremists will surely jump to another platform, but censorship is amazingly effective at hindering recruitment and keeping out the "normies".
FWIW the ban of Wolfenstein was informed by an understanding of games as pure entertainment for kids in the vein of Tetris, Pacman or Space Invaders. "We put swastikas and nazis in this video game" was a legitimately horrifying prospect at the time. If modern Wolfenstein games insisted on not modifying the releases for Germany, they would likely initially be banned but be able to overturn this ban once and for all given we now understand games as a narrative medium like film and nobody ever had to worry about removing the nazis from the Indiana Jones movies.
Whats new is "I want to band all criticism of my religion", that aspect is new for the "free" west.
- Argument: States cannot ban/close platforms - sure they can, as soon as you kick an app off the app store it's over for most of the users. That's a severe step though, and could be legally contested; my personal opinion is that it's realistic a court could deem a complete shutdown unconstitutional.
- Argument: This is censorship - not really, censorship in the German legal context means pre-control of messages before dissemination. The deal here is about implementing measures to follow German laws. Of course, in a wider sense, this is some sort of censorship mechanism which has some technical similarity with other infrastructures such as those in china. But that's the tradeoff in Germany - it's restricting free speech to protect pro-democratic elements. Whether that works or not is going to be an important question in the next years.
Censorship, and the legal concept of censorship, are such very different things that using one as the response to the other is silly!
The local lawmaker's definition of censorship in a legal context, when transposed in a non-legal discussion, is just one country's opinion, not an authoritative answer to whether something is censorship.
It's absolutely vital to understand that prohibiting some speech has been a core feature of Germany's democracy since 1945. At the same time, the public use of the word "censorship" has diluted so much (especially online) that it's hardly useful.
So I'd argue that it totally makes sense to try and define what we're talking about, and how and why the state intervenes.
> Argument: This is X - not really, X defined legally (..)
Which is in itself an often occurring argument which (in my opinion) isn't extremely useful.
You are transposing the legal definition of censorship into this argument. This is perfectly alright, except most people who make the argument "this is censorship" aren't referring to the legal definition of censorship. So your counterpoint is moot.
I'm not trying to say that those people are right necessarily, just that arguing against these points requires other arguments than this one.
(edited for clarity)
It's a tradeoff and before you know it, you are the one sitting on the wrong side of the table. Watcha gonna do then?
Some background for the discussion:
- Germany has a different take on freedom of speech from the US. There are things that you cannot say (holocaust denial, inciting racial violence). We can argue about this, but it's deeply ingrained in the legal system and unrealistic to change
- Germany has a special law regulating responsibilities and content moderation in social media (NetzDG, think section 230 but wider). This law - among other things - mandates content moderation and cooperation with law enforcement
- A key point in the debate surrounding Telegram is the question of whether or not it is a "platform", that is an open social network. Telegram argues that it's a messenger, but in practice, there are many open and public groups used for public debates. So Germany argues that it should be regulated in accordance with the NetzDG, which Telegram denies.
- Recently, there have been a number of death threats and criminal conspiracies which were orchestrated via Telegram; on top, a huge chunk of covid deniers and co are active in this space.
- Telegram so far has not cooperated at all (in contrast with other social platforms, even TikTok).
So in essence, this is currently a battle about the German government saying: Look here, you got a bunch of criminals and terrorists (literally, with weapons) on your platform, you need to do something about it.
[edit] Here is a report on the assassination plot and subsequent raids: https://www.euronews.com/2021/12/15/german-police-launch-rai...
There is nothing more engaging than existential threat. As long as anybody anywhere stands to benefit from fomenting the idea of existential threat and using the terror thus inspired to get a social group to exterminate a selected other social group… which is then itself under existential threat and can respond in kind… the only refuge to this is something like a government or legal system watching over this.
Otherwise competitive pressure will ensure that the platform fomenting the most fear of existential threat will have the most engagement and will prosper. YouTube seems to have already recognized this and is grappling with it in its own way. I doubt Telegram has any wish to moderate its real purpose for existence and undermine the engagement it must have to survive.
And there is nobody who cannot be turned monstrous through invoking existential threat: all the better if it's a realistic fear, it will persist long after the tables are turned and the victim has become the monster in turn. History has shown this really clearly.
Germany, in general, seems to be a very poor country to do digital business compared to most other places. This is the same country that required (requires?) streamers to get a broadcasting license that cost thousands of euros to stream to more than 500 people.
More than 20,000 simultaneous viewers on averaged over a six months period and if the content is considered relevant for public opinion formation.
That doesn't make it any better. You have +20k viewers on avg last 6 months and the government doesn't like what you are saying for any reason, they revoke your license. If this isn't a control over freedom of speech (and I'm not saying freedom to call violence on people or anything here), I don't know what is really.
Not really; some countries would be against just because it is Germany pushing for it. If necessary, they would call out Germany doing the nazi thing, again, and forcing the rest of Europe to do the same, again.
This sounds like a police matter, and should be a question that is asked to, not by, the government.
Not that any government understands that…
NetzDG is much less broad, only applying to social networks (so not Telegram) with more than 2M users.
>(1) Dieses Gesetz gilt für Telemediendiensteanbieter, die mit Gewinnerzielungsabsicht Plattformen im Internet betreiben, die dazu bestimmt sind, dass Nutzer beliebige Inhalte mit anderen Nutzern teilen oder der Öffentlichkeit zugänglich machen (soziale Netzwerke).
We have a requirement for profit motive (so the Fediverse is mostly safe) and sharing arbitrary content with different users (broadly) or the public.
>(2) Plattformen mit journalistisch-redaktionell gestalteten Angeboten, die vom Diensteanbieter selbst verantwortet werden, gelten nicht als soziale Netzwerke im Sinne dieses Gesetzes.
Blogs and news sites that do not claim the above-mentioned protection under TMG are specifically excluded as social networks here.
>(3) Das Gleiche gilt für Plattformen, die zur Individualkommunikation oder zur Verbreitung spezifischer Inhalte bestimmt sind.
Further exceptions for "individual communication" and "posting specific content".
So I guess a Telegram Group specifically counts as a social network under this definition. It'd be anyone's guess how many people a group needs to no longer count as "individual communication", that's probably for a German court to decide.
It all boils down to the question of whether Telegram is a public forum or a messenger service.
A 1000+ group isn't really a messenger service anymore.
A 20 people family group clearly is a messenger service.
So IMHO the question is where is the limit? And is the limit based on other factors then just the number of involved people?
Also pushing this IMHO this doesn't change any of the problems they want to change. It likely even makes them worse.
As someone with family members that are being fed conspiracy theories through telegram groups I'm definitely suspicious. On the other hand, if telegram or the telegram group feature is banned another service will just take its place and these people will just feel more oppressed/attacked possibly making the situation worse.
Overall I feel social media is a net negative for society because it creates a feedback loop of your own "bubble" with more and more extremist and radical ideas, often with no scientific or even remotely factual basis.
(1): Messaging in the sense of a digital continuation of letter writing.
Still, it's a stupid move.
There are endless alternatives.
And the problem isn't really caused or amplified by Telegram, Telegram is just an arbitrary chosen tool which happen to meet the requirements for the given use case.
It's not even the best tool out there for the given use case.
In the end this is nothing more then trying to find a scapegoat to blame a out of control situation on. A situation caused by years of political/social negligence of increasingly out-of-touch political parties combined with out-of-touch media.
The choice of choosing it as a scapegoat already shows how out of touch it is, I mean like did they forget that it's one of the most widely used messengers in Germany by all parts of the society?? You are literally telling people which have gotten increasingly suspect of the government and media that the tool they are nicely using since years is supposedly easier. Putting people into a very obvious perceived difference between their reality and what you tell them, without a good reasoning basis, is a pretty sure fire way to lose more trust.
Germany has freedom of opinion, they explicitly decided against American style freedom of speech after WW2
I am generally a proponent of as much free speech as possible, as long as it is lawful, and the laws in question are not just authoritarian wet dreams. Inciting violence or making threats is not lawful. It's unlawful not just in Germany but in most other places including the US too, and for good reason.
When it comes to these kinds of German telegram groups we're not even talking about thinly-veiled threats where there is wiggle room in interpretation, we're talking about people saying "we're at war and must fight until every politician and traitor is executed. Arm yourself today!".
Telegram groups promoting these kinds of threats daily with tens of thousands of members exist, and telegram provides tools to create and promote such groups easily. So I am not buying any claim that they are a mere messenger service.
This is therefore one of the few cases where I do not mind the government demanding the company take action, or else face legal consequences up to effectively shutting them down within Germany.
What gives me pause at the same time is that German politicians usually do not just demand Telegram shut down clearly illegal speech like threats, but also constantly talk about vague "misinformation"/"fake news"/"conspiracy theories". As much as "fake news" sucks, it cannot be the government in a free society deciding what is "real news".
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5q5vx/german-soldier-covid-...
Go to the US, go to a police officer, and just tell them you want to kill the President.
Watch what happens.
There is no such thing as absolute free speech, even in the US.
To clarify how regular people could get access to a client… any https website could host a front end widget, for instance. Easy delivery via web browser (which is general-purpose enough that it can’t ban all possible widgets and hard to ban).
Does Germany have legal and technical means to block the web version, web.telegram.org ?
Either way, the state wins, since not all chat apps are self-righteous enough to say no to a lucrative market on principle of refusing to cooperate with a nation state. They learned that from watching companies bend over backwards for the Chinese market.
While I do agree with her that something must be done about Telegram given that criminal activity including Holocaust denial and plotting murder of governors [1] can go on there without any moderation while requests for providing IP addresses and other user data are being routinely ignored by the service, she is falling into the same trap as many interior politicians do and thinks that the solution is primarily to put pressure on Telegram.
It would be better to put police pressure on the ringleaders and participators of such Telegram channels. They are often enough known by clear name and march on the streets so they can be arrested there, but that requires actual effort from a police force that is already under suspicion of far-right infiltration.
[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/kretschmer-drohung-razzia-1...
> White supremacists openly organize racist violence on Telegram, report finds
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/26/tech/white-supremacists-t...
> Are Private Messaging Apps the Next Misinformation Hot Spot? Telegram and Signal, the encrypted services that keep conversations confidential, are increasingly popular. Our tech columnists discuss whether this could get ugly.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/t...
> A report this week found that the messaging app had emerged as a central hub for several conspiracy movements espousing antisemitic tropes and memes, including QAnon, as well as others on the extreme right promoting violence.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/15/parler-...
> Far-right groups move online conversations from social media to chat apps — and out of view of law enforcement
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/oct/14/telegram-war...
> In collaboration with anti-fascist research group the White Rose Society, the Guardian has tracked McLean’s activity through the rabbit warren of largely unregulated Telegram groups and found that he describes a vastly different version of his intentions.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/mar/26/where...
> Why right-wing extremists’ favorite new platform is so dangerous. Telegram’s lax content moderation and encrypted chats make it a convenient tool for extremists.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22238755/telegram-messaging-socia...
No. Why? Simply because not only it is free to use, but the roads to hell are paved with good intentions. This is what these 'journalists' from these publications fail to highlight each time privacy or free software supporters build tools that can also be used by terrorists and extremists.
Like one of the comments, the links provided make no argument against Telegram or similar tools like Telegram itself. The responses of these editors in those links towards mentioning a tool used for good now being abused by malicious users is highly predictable, repetitive and at most unsurprising.
>links CNN, Guardian and Vox
Schroeder has destroyed the welfare state, increased reliance on Russia's natural gas and got a job at Gazprom after he retired from politics.
I'm sure that Putin will be very glad to shut down Telegram as well.
Same as in the U.S., liberals in Germany are very happy to spread COVID-19 misinformation:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/01/08/sotomayor...
While they are at it, they could look into other fancy tech from China, for example video surveillance that checks if people conform to Corona rules.
After all, why not - China seems to be so successful, what could go wrong?