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.
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.
It's hilarious to watch both praising and bashing Telegram in the same evening news, and how no journalist seems to care.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
When the media is used as propaganda - surely this has never happened before?