Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested at French airport
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This will be an interesting case to watch -- I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort -- but generally my understanding is that harassment on border entry has been the order of the day, rather than arrests.
But that's what exactly they want no? EU is literally implementing a regulation that will allow to "circumvent end-to-end encryption to address child sexual abuse material". I believe it failed to pass recently, but they will try again - and nothing stops countries to implement it independently. I think France is the one who was pushing for that in the first place.
There are two legistive bodies in the EU, one is only allowed to propose law, the other is only allowed to vote on it.
Lots of braindead laws get put to a vote, theres no requirement that they get through.
I understand that raising the alarm is helpful, but it would be helpful if people took a second to understand how the EU works, the politicians involved and how their motions are perceived by the rest of parliament.
Which would be pedantry if it weren't that one of the two chambers is much more in line with the former
Notably, it can be agreed upon in the EC using qualified majority, unilateral veto doesn't apply.
The last time they tried (in June), the qualified majority wasn't reached, but the difference was slim.
https://www.wired.com/story/europes-moral-crusader-lays-down...
https://www.statewatch.org/news/2024/july/police-should-have...
"How has a peaceful European country ended up the gun murder capital of the EU?" "Things got so bad that the government called in the army to help the police. And there's a new deadly trend emerging in this battle. Gang members as young as 14 are increasingly using explosives to target rivals as they fight over drug turfs. "
things tend to be relative, hence statistics are a thing. The gun murder capital of Europe without some hard data as to what that means sounds a bit like the radiation poisoning center of Antarctica, gang members as young as 14 can definitely be increasingly doing things if before they started increasing there were zero gang members below 14 using explosives etc.
Another problem is just taking what the police say as being "true", for example the police say there are 62000 people in Stockholm (a city of slightly over 920000) "linked" to criminal gangs - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-has-around-62000... this article uses the word linked twice, in the title linked to criminal gangs, and later in the article "the authorities have struggled for years to contain violence linked to organised crime." I wonder if they have 62000 people who are violent in their linkage, somehow I doubt it but this seems to be the impression.
Hey, I bet there is a problem, how big of a problem, probably not as big as these news stories imply. Why not? Well because if I had a really big nasty problem I wouldn't just imply it, I would lay it out, plenty of engagement to go around, but if my engagement could benefit from exaggerating the problem then I will imply instead of stating plainly.
At any rate more than 6% of the population of Stockholm is currently not involved in a violent gang war which one might infer from the reportage.
If you are not an inmate I will assume that you are a free person living in a western society. Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm, lets just say for the statistics you are going to live in a slightly not so friendly neighbourhood where the lying police said that it is an area populated with predominantly 14 years old gang members, now since police by your own words cannot be trusted we will assume that their information is not correct and the area is perfectly fine and safe.
Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur? Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.
Now you can choose to deny reality and look away, but the good thing about reality is, that it is just like gravity it just hits you sometimes.
I don't know if your PM have to call in the army to help with gang related crimes the situation seem pretty bad to me, again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.
I know we're supposed to think everybody is being honest here, but I don't think you do love responses like this.
>Well there is only one way to find out statistically since you love statistics.
right, to get the rates of deaths by violence, rates of death by gang related violence, compare that to other parts of the world with gang related violence etc. etc. I mean I agree, everybody knows how to do statistics!
>Since you are free person you a free to go and live in Stockholm,
I stand corrected, not everybody knows how to do statistics.
>again you are free to prove me wrong statistically, and take your chances.
but anyway that is not how statistics works.
>Of course the question that follow is are you going to take that chance ? I already know the answer.
You know the answer as to whether I am willing to move to a part of Stockholm the police identify as high crime from "a western society" based on a hacker news argument with someone who evidently doesn't know how statistics work?
Amazing!!
>Please run the maths and tell me with just 5% probability to get executed by a 14 years old gang member by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times how likely is this event to occur?
If "with just 5% probability to get executed" then the answer to "how likely is this event to occur?" is 5%. However as this is "by walking down the street you live in to get to your home lets just say 100 times" then that would mean 5 out of every 100 times somebody walks home they get executed.
Given the earlier number of people in the article linked with crime was 62000, and assuming that everybody walks home at least once per day and 5% of people walking home get executed by 14 year olds it follows that in your world 3100 people per day are getting executed by 14 year olds in Stockholm, that seems a lot. I mean in 30 days that would be more than the number of people linked with crime!
If that were true I don't think the EU would just be proposing to help inmates in their prisons but might be sending peace keeping forces in to help.
Which is hilarious because it also says there are 62000 gang linked people in Stockholm.
One thing you are always told to watch out for is big round numbers in stats, because it is pretty unlikely it is just 62000 and not 62119 or something (not a big stats guy, just something I've read)
At any rate the article says 62000 linked to gangs, and 62 killings (pretty weird that). So a 0.1% violence among the linked to gangs people (if all the murders were linked to gangs), but out of the full pop of Sweden 10,490,000 this is a 0.000591% rate of murder, the U.S as a whole has 0.0075 murder rate right now.
Zoom in on parts of the U.S you get a much higher murder rate - https://usafacts.org/articles/which-cities-have-the-highest-...
like I said everything is relative, and Sweden does not have as big a problem as the reporting lets on.
And take it from someone who actually lives in the area (as opposed to HN speculators): YES it has gotten significantly worse over the last five years (having already been bad for decades), and YES 14 year old hitmen with explosives and automatic weapons are now an actual thing, not just a couple of incidents.
The politics of this is so inflamed, which makes it harder to discuss, much less solve the problems. I am not against immigration per se, from any given country. But right now, it is obviously causing major problems that need to be handled with extreme prejudice.
At least in Australia and in the UK. Maybe they're a moderate and balanced presenter of truth on the ground in Sweden.
Seems unlikely.
I'm fully aware this reads as "attacking the source" but there's no rabid attack intended here just a frank pragmatic assessment of what "Sky News Investigates" actually means.
A tip is that whenever you reach a ludicrous conclusion "they do nothing to stop underage violence", it's probably your analysis that is ludicrous and not the object being analyzed.
Yes, the police and social services has compiled written information that they want to share with parents of at-risk children.
This seems a strange thing to ridicule.
The main issue being "an encrypted messenger". So whatsapp=gang… unclear if telegram is ok since it's normally not e2ee.
I am skeptical this will achieve anything useful.
> Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. It's been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn't really matter whether it's opposition or the ruling party that is using Telegram. For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides. We don't become prejudiced in this way.
> It's not that we are rooting for the opposition or we are rooting for the ruling party. It's not that we don't care, but we think it's important to have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone.. You don't want to be geopolitically aligned. You don't want to select the winners in any of these political fights.
He'd have you believe that all messages are welcome on Telegram, that no material is censored, that it's all about free expression, that they're too small to provide moderation.
But when an account is flagged for spam, Telegram rapidly responds and restricts or kills the account. So they can and do moderate content.
It's just that accounts can get flagged for CSAM hundreds of times and Telegram takes no action.
They're making a choice to provide a platform for this material. That's against the law and prison time is absolutely justified.
https://restoreprivacy.com/telegram-sharing-user-data/
> the operators of the messenger app Telegram have released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in several cases. According to SPIEGEL information, this was data from suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it is still difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.
Signal and Telegram were publicly sparring in May 2024, https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/chat-apps-government-ties-a...
> two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
"other offences" probably means copyright issues?
sounds logical and can probably be checked!
>"routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.”
sounds logical and being a big company I suppose true.
>“the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption”
sounds probable, meaning they got funding from some NSA project.
>“activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”
this sounds a bit crazy!
In my experience it's the channel's admins who respond, not Telegram's.
If that's the case then CSAM not getting actioned is probably just channel admins allowing content that they approve of.
I suspect that Telegram could put significantly more effort into CSAM suppression and enforcement, but I seriously doubt this is really what's up with the French arrest of Durov.
Does it?
The EU usually takes 3 steps forward, 1 to 2 steps backwards.
It doesn't show how it actually is the only or best way to attain the goal.
And since Apple's implimentation is a black box whos internal workings are not under the users control and not auditable by anyone outside of Apple, it's automatically less secure, in the sense that you should trust it less than some other equivalent that is under the users control and publicly auditable, or just some other mechanism entirely if no other such open platform enclave implimentation exists.
Signal or anything else that doesn't use the secure enclave may indeed be, or may not be less secure than something that does use the secure enclave. The simple existence and use of the enclave does not automatically define superior or inferior security. It also possible that anything else might be less secure, but only on iPhones because or limitations Apple imposes on everything on the platform except for themselves, which I don't think should count.
It's also possible to devise a mechnaism that benefits from the enclave without needing to use the enclave directly. All software on the device can rely on trusting the OS to keep one app from reading another app, because they can trust that the OS itsef can only come from Apple and the bootloader woukld refuse to boot anything else, etc.
There are infinite ways to attain any goal. The way Apple designed their secure enclave and os platform is just one way.
Orthogonal facets are orthogonal.
If we are talking about the security of a messaging system, then the only thing that matters to compare, is the security of the messaging system, not any particular implimentation detail.
All messaging systems are "comparable". If one relies on a secure enclave and one does not, it's hardly any more different than if one is painted yellow and one is painted green.
Messaging apps on phones painted blue and with tyre inflators are exactly "comparable" to ones on phones painted yellow with secure enclaves.
So unless you’ve built application by yourself, you have no guarantee of it’s sequrity.
PGP is impractical for regular email communication unfortunately and pointless on platform like gmail.
There's no scenario where a third party has compromised your phone without Apple's collaboration, which is the only scenario where the secure enclave would maybe protect you (and even then, the bad actor would just read your messages off the screen or memory directly).
Why? I'm allowed to connect two or more tin cans by a string. Why can't Apple?
If you don't have a tin can, then you can't join.
Why do you need it when you have Matrix and Signal? Why do you trust a closed, non-auditable Apple software?
Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn't reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.
Of course, such legislation only has any chance in hell of improving lives if the standard of living for children, the education, the ... IN social services is good. It is very easy to see this WILL put more children into such a situation, and that's about the only thing such legislation will definitely do. It is completely absurd to think this is going to end drugs, abuse or whatever else they're looking for.
Is that the case? Is it the case that the standard of living, education, ... in social services is good?
No. Not at all. There's constant scandals and if a child that gets into a social services institution makes it into university, just one, any given year, that's national news. Prostitution in social services is common, drugs and crime are everywhere.
It seems there is A LOT more work to be done on the other side of social services first. They seem to perform VERY badly once they actually catch someone. So why do this? Because it isn't to help children. At the very best they see this as a cheap way to look like they're improving social services.
It lays bare that their motivation is blanket surveillance for their own political ends and nothing to do with protecting children in the slightest.
Social Services are one of the most consistently underfunded and under-resources arms of government.
Australia has recently had to "increase the bar" at which mandatory reporting is required because the resources don't exist to even consider investigation of cases where the child's life isn't in immediate danger.
It's gross, but it seems politics around the world has found it's shared water level, and that level is happy with exploiting exploited children.
This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.
if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property? if they make such an excuse, it would seem to me they’re either too irresponsible or just plain incompetent.
again, i’m not sure how i feel about the implications of this, but the whole “we just don’t have the resources” feels like a cowards excuse rather than reality—particularly as someone already pointed out, they seem to gather their wits to make a sizable dent when it’s spam.
i’m not sure of the specifics of what you mean by 100% of officials must be thrown out” but if im understanding what you’re implying, i disagree, most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces . and if they don’t, then yes, why wouldn’t we hold them responsible?
it seems like you’re indicating there should be no consequences for people who don’t take on obligations…
> i don’t see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations.
of course they take on obligations, it’s partially why we pay executives so much because they’re taking on obligations. this isn’t some pauper struggling to pay rent on his studio apartment—he was arrested after traveling from one country to another in his private jet.
again, i haven’t spent much energy on the implications from effect iteration of this but we have pretty solid evidence of what happens when we allow these wannabe kings to claim they should have nothing but positive personal benefits while externalizing any negatives onto the rest of us.
“you should pay me obscene amounts and treat me like a king while i take no responsibility whatsoever” is absurd. and we’re seeing the cascading effects of this absurdity in real time.
And I am saying that zero percent of them do that. And somebody saying that Durov "take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces". My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.
That's literally a thing that happens during trial, at least for certain crimes and legal systems.
Can't speak to this specific case because (1) IANAL, and (2) my grasp of the French language is so bad that I can't even reliably say the French for "I don't speak French".
https://www.criminal-lawyers.com.au/criminal-defences/lack-i...
of course there is…
one of the reasons people justifiably bring up spam in these “my free speech” cases is because it shows definitively that the “free speech absolutists” don’t actually care about free speech—if they truly believed all speech is as valuable as all other speech then spam would have the same weight of priority as non-spam speech for them, yet they have no problem silencing spam.
off the top of my head, we would consider their guard rails against spam and have they implemented those same guard rails against the things they’re being charged for? if not, then obviously they’re not making real attempts.
of course there are multiple ways to determine whether they’ve made meaningful attempts. i think this is all moot though, if my understanding is correct, he’s resisted doing anything at all which is why he’s been charged.
as i said in a different post though, it’s still muddy on the specifics, we’ll know more later—we’re just wildly guessing at this point.
That's a strawman. They believe all speech should be held legally equal, not that's it's value is equal.
It's that any speech has the potential to be extremely valuable to the person not responsible for regulating it.
For the good of the discussion, I would however appreciate if you kept your baseless fantasies about council housing - which is both numerous and very safe in France, a country which tries to do something to mitigate poverty - out of it.
This "shows" those things in much the same way that First Contact "shows" how one may convert a Titan missile into a 3-person faster-than-light spacecraft in a post-nuclear-war Bozeman, Montana.
if they refuse to take steps whatsoever, yes, that’s a problem. why does it feel like you both understand the problem yet are defending the problem at the same time?
Even if true, what then? It doesn't follow said property can be ethically transferred to anyone else; otherwise you've just thrown out all semblance of property rights. You've sold off the world to the HOA's, as it were; now anyone who objects to the way you maintain your grounds has a button to push to make sure you are deprived of any grounds you keep. Be they real, or digital.
If I make a platform that shuffles bits around, and a bunch of users start using it for CP and terrorism (lets assume perfect enforcement/investigative capability up until piercing the platform, so probability 1 on the CP/terrorism front); I don't think the choice then is "lets shluff this to someone responsible to admin/make a tap". The only ethically tenable approach would be "well, no more moving bits around by anyone for anyone else anymore". And at that point we've unmade computing essentially.
No one, and I mean "Not One Single Entity, government or otherwise" can be trusted to not to abuse privileged access; and once put into the position to abuse, abstain from doing so. Abuse is probability 1. This is part of why I believe Stallman was right. The concept of the user account has been a disaster for the human species. As it is by the prescribing of unique identifiers to discern one operation on behalf of someone from another that has created a world in which we can even imagine such horrifying concepts as a small group unilaterally managing the entirety of the rest of humanity, for any purpose.
For me it is a sobering thought on the impact of automated business systems. I've practically 180'd on actual character of my own life's work. It's got me in a spot where I'm strongly considering burning my tools. Extreme? Maybe. Sometimes though, you have to accept that there are extremely unpleasant consequences out there that cannot be satisfactorally mitigated.
So I have a return question for you. Are you sure that the question you asked is the one you should be asking, or should you be asking yourself, "how many lives are acceptable casualties in order to continue operating within the bounds of my assumed ethical envelope?" Because there is a counter of people effected; you may not be able to read it or write it, but it's there.
If a business can't do a thing it is required to do, their CEO's option is "close business" or "break law".
> it failed to pass recently
These two sentences cannot be both true
> I don't believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort
means
> I believe every western nation wants all messaging to be locally-backdoored
> I believe no western nation wants any messaging to be non-locally-backdoored
> I believe all western nations want all messaging to be free of remote backdoors
!=
>> I believe every western nation wants all messaging to be locally-backdoored
We don’t trust proprietary stuff because we’ve been burned by it, if there’s an open standard, even a worse one: use it.
If it’s really that bad, we need to improve the standard.
You connect from any compatible client; and the effort that has gone in to the Mail client for iOS means it’s a decent enough mail client for non-iCloud mail accounts too.
Apples closed ecosystem is mostly its developer tooling and iMessage.
If your rationale against first-party backdoors relies on this logic, then you're in for a really big surprise when you read the Snowden leaks.
I wouldn't. I don't trust Apple hardware or software, and I don't see why anyone who cares about these issues ever would. But fortunately Telegram runs on devices and OSes from a wide range of suppliers, many of which might be less open to the influences that apply to Apple.
Most use normal chats.
With anonymous accounts, using anonymous +888 numbers, whose price has increased from $16 to $1000+ in a matter of a year, it is indeed a very convenient playground for all sorts of activities.
> To get an anonymous number, you need to go purchase one through the Fragment blockchain... Durov calls Fragment “an amazing success” that already generated over $50 million in sales in less than a month.
SimpleX is the real deal.
They actually don't want that backdoored, guaranteed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40063025 ("ChatControl: EU ministers want to exempt themselves (european-pirateparty.eu)", 202 comments)
Simultaneously, they need a light shone on their private lives for the same reason they want to do that to the rest of us: to make sure they're not abusing their access to sensitive information, getting blackmailed, or otherwise being nefarious.
I have absolutely no idea how to fix this apparent paradox. Perhaps it can't be done. Even if it can, tech is unstable and this is all a moving target — the way GenAI is going, I suspect that we'll all have to carry always-on cameras that log and sign everything just to prove we didn't do whatever some picture or video shows us doing.
Yeah good luck with that :')
PS: A change to "guilty until proven innocent" policy would require a serious constitutional change in most countries.
Indeed, though there I was thinking more the court of public opinion which loves hearsay and rumour.
The actual law? I have no idea. Tech will change the world before the law can catch up with yesterday.
You mean railway station locker codes for bags of money from Quatar?
For blackmail I mean e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kompromat and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_research
For sensitive information, I mean e.g. a whistleblower has contacted them, or they're working out the finances for next year and there's potential for market manipulation based on the discussions so far, or they're discussing an emergency (health/economic/military) response that will be unpopular with someone no matter what.
If you are with your example referring to some specific example of them committing crimes, I refer you to my second paragraph in the original message:
> Simultaneously, they need a light shone on their private lives for the same reason they want to do that to the rest of us: to make sure they're not abusing their access to sensitive information, getting blackmailed, or otherwise being nefarious.
BTW, install your own XMPP server and use OMEMO-compatible clients - Conversations on Android, Gajim on desktop - and you get to have access to non-surveilled [1]communications just like those politico's.
[1] assuming that your client and server devices remain uncompromised, not a given if you happen to be a high-value target. Caveat emptor.
An even more egregious example : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39918245 Facebook-Meta and Whatsapp maybe accessories to warcrimes perpetrated on a massive scale.
It's not on by default, works only between 2 devices, they both have to be online at the same time and you can't access anything from the web. And group chats don't support it at all. Private chats are not end to end encrypted by default and it's actually quite clumsy to encrypt them so almost nobody uses it.
It's really weird that Telegram is singled out like this.
I will admit I am confused. I can only assume something else is at play.
edit: The only thing I can think of is that there some rather gruesome channels showing Russia/Ukraine, Palestine/Israel toll. I wonder if it was decided that general population should not have access to these.
As a result, it doesn't respond to authorities because it doesn't have to. However, this approach is unsustainable and unacceptable for many governments, both in the East and the West. That's why he's being accused in France: he is not "cooperating with law enforcement".
Or it could be that he has French citizenship; subject to French law. Spreading your infrastructure across legal jurisdiction doesn't make you stateless - it just ensures you're subject to the laws of each jurisdiction you operate in.
I don't think that's accurate. Like any other business, he collects money from the Western users, so that's one easy choke point. He is also fully accountable to Apple, otherwise he can forget about 1.5 billion Iphone users forever. (apparently, he also just seems to enjoy visiting France and other countries he decided to go against)
What does this even mean???
He is partially accountable to Apple - he's agreed to a TOS and EULA, as well as conditions for furnishing his Apps. Even with Apple's authoritarian control of their ecosystem though, he isn't fully accountable to Apple. Apple is not a nation or a court that can make decisions like that on their behalf; they have been sued several times for taking punitive action that is illegal obstruction.
Nobody is "fully accountable" to Apple. Apple is fully accountable to the law, and that's that.
It's really easy for e.g. a drugdealer to post QR codes or something on lamp posts with their contact and then they can invite people. Making Telegram go away is just going to hide the problem, not solve it.
In Telegram you can have 10k and more in a channel
wasn't he bragging that he operates with like a dozen people or something. I can also see him just punting on many kinds of moderation (outside of the kind that helps running the service), because it's a lot of subjective, dirty work and an army of people.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc...
>The European Commission has told its staff to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications.
Also Telegram is not E2E by default. You need to activate it per chat. By default and in groups it is only server encrypted.
Tbh given both those apps company's have dealings with gov in aus I'm gonna say signals probably already got a backdoor into em. If you don't think so you don't know aus law well enough or who signals are.
Also the owners of the apps aren't liable for the content of the conversations. Their liable for providing a platform for the conversation to take place and for not knowingly taking available efforts to curb criminal activity on that platfor/service. It's like hey I'm gonna rent you a store house to hide all your illegal drugs in Mr gang member. I'm not doing the hiding or anything but I'm assisting the activity by providing the store house. I could make efforts to curb such activity like you know doing a rental inspection once every six months but I choose not to and turn a blind eye. Am I assisting a crime or am I completely innocent? Now repeat this but telegram is the store house.
Not by default (unlike the other services you've mentioned )?
They do know how to respond to copyright complaints. Not so much about other, far more serious sort of illegal activities. Just on that point, they should have expected something to be done against them.
For fun, I tried that and was unsuccessful, at least in the allotted time.
Google turned up many third-party references to illegal activity on Telegram, but that's not the same thing.
Search for any of these phrases and it will return tons of channels to join:
- Combo lists - Check fraud - Redline Stealer - Bank logs
There are tens of thousands of channels on Telegram w illegal content and material.
I really do hope they dont shut it down bc it's an extremely valuable asset in terms of intelligence and monitoring criminals haha
Source: I work in CTI and actively monitor and scan thousands of Telegram channels.
I used python and the Telethon and Pyrogram frameworks to help scrape and monitor em.
A paid Telegram account can be in 1k channels/groups. A free Telegram account can be in 500 channels/groups.
Good luck and happy programming!
> "Thierry Breton, the French commissioner, had posted the warning letter on X, the platform owned by Musk, hours before the billionaire interviewed US presidential candidate Donald Trump, also on X."
> "On Tuesday the European Commission denied Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter."
https://www.ft.com/content/09cf4713-7199-4e47-a373-ed5de61c2...
> Breton is empowered to oversee enforcement of the DSA and can communicate independently with companies.
So maybe he didn't need to get permission from anyone to send the letter.
The fact that it was wound back by the head of the EU's executive branch - Breton's boss - demoted the statement to "the opinion of the commissioner".
I don't remember anything about "the opinion of the commissioner" in the letter, but there was huge "eu commission" sign right on the top. So the letter went as complitly "official" position of commission.
Don't have to like it but the law is the law.
Don't have to like it but the law is the law. /s
It might be different in other places but here, in a large city of continental Europe, Telegram is definitely little more than an enabler for illegal activities.
The victim of drugs is the whole society. It's only "victimless" in an absolutely individualistic environment, which I wouldn't even call a "society".
But none of this contradicts my initial comment. Telegram is a straight enabler of illegal activities.
That said, you CAN buy drugs on Telegram, sure, it is just not as easy as everyone seems to think. You need to know the account name of a service that delivers in your area, you need to be reeealy careful when typing the account name because for every real drug seller account there are multiple fakes with slight variation in the name that fish for people using search, and then even if you have a verified account and they sold you drugs last month, there is like 30% chance that the account have been compromised and now you are talking with scammers again.
She first asked where I was and was very coincidentally there as well. A sure sign of a scam.
Then asked me to buy a steam card and take a photo of the code before "meeting".
With more or less success, sure, but they can at least say there is an attempt and they do take down stuff. Durov pretty much brags about not doing the bare minimum.
It's that simple.
I am sure all those claims in the media about "cooperating with terrorists" is just a lie. Probably it is something related to not implementing fingerprints for copyrighted material.
It’s become centralized and controlled by the hands of the few.
This is not an improvement.
There are other ways to capture and ensnare criminals. Sacrificing our privacy for the "greater good" is a bridge too far.
As one counter point, think about all of the completely fine human behaviors that instantly become kompromat when the powers have access to your every communication. That is way more dangerous to democracy, freedom, and liberty than a slightly smaller chance of "not protecting the children".
Besides, if we actually cared so much about children, we wouldn't let them not get school lunches, we wouldn't sell them on gambling and gacha games, and we'd do a much better job of educating them.
> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- A committee which included Benjamin Franklin
_____________
That said, this quote is typically misused, or at best being used wayyy outside its original context. [0]
The Penn family, the local semi-nobility of Pennsylvania, are offering the government a one-time "donation"... in exchange for getting a perpetual exemption from all taxes.
A committee of elected representatives--among them Franklin--are strongly opposed to it, since they believe the democratic legislature's "essential Liberty" to impose taxes for its citizens is way more important than any "temporary Safety" of a one-time lump sum.
[0] https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01...
Those who would give up essential Long-Term Economic Stability, to purchase a little temporary Shareholder Profits, deserve neither Long-Term Economic Stability nor Shareholder Profits.
Those who would give up essential Vendor Independence, to purchase a little temporary High-Resolution Retina Display, deserve neither Vendor Independence nor High-Resolution Retina Display.
Those who would give up essential Safety, to purchase a little temporary Liberty, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Those who would give up essential Refrigerator, to purchase a little temporary Stockpile of Peanut Butter, deserve neither Refrigerator nor Stockpile of Peanut Butter.
This arrest is not about E2EE.
The arrest is about how much responsibility social media platforms have about the content posted on them.
There is no good answers to that question, and the debate of topic online is utterly useless.
First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.
Second, you propose your preferred moral economy as one that only curtails harms. In fact, you create another harm implementing what you think is right.
Reasonable people disagree about which is worse -- the creation and public support of a technocratic oligarchy in control of how humans communicate or the proliferation of some harms that take advantage of unfettered communication. But please don't be simple minded, pretending to yourself or others that there aren't real costs, social and physical, on both sides of this.
For myself, I think private communications are a human right and a massive good for society, and I don't condone criminal acts undertaken using messaging.
and they're usually public property and policed. Routine police inspection on a road and in particular control of borders and key nodes in your transportation infrastructure isn't exactly controversial. (unless you're part of some extreme political faction). You know a lot of countries where people can drive without a license plate?
Private communication is important but it has always had limits, this crypto mentality of companies exercising no compliance, having no borders, ignoring the law and national security doesn't have a precedent. Historically people communicated say in the US using an American telecommunications network which without a doubt complied with legal requests. It's not at all self evident that we should tolerate telecoms infrastructure operated by a Russian out of Dubai that is primarily used by an enemy we're effectively at war with.
And no, putting company's in charge of your privacy isn't a solution, if they can be compelled to give away your communication history then they'll abuse it. Have you not learned anything from the Snowden leaks?
And it's not true that with electronic communication you either get full privacy or none. You can have end-to-end encrypted messages with unencrypted metadata, so that when police observe a message implicating the sender in a crime (e.g. on an arrested suspect's phone) they can get a search warrant for the IP address or phone number associated with that account and then visit the owner in person to look at the messages on their phone. This doesn't allow police to read everyone's messages all the time undetected, but does allow them to read specific people's messages if they get a warrant.
Since Telegram doesn't only have unencrypted metadata but also plenty of unencrypted messages, there must've been many cases where a search warrant would've yielded lots of useful information. If Telegram didn't properly respond to all warrants, it seems fair to launch an investigation.
With such a setup what does it mean to comply with warrants? Are we saying that Telegram should voluntarily yield all information regardless of jurisdiction?
"roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly."
All of those can be monitored by the government, even your letters could be.
To use your analogy: shouldn’t everyone look away when you drive by so that you can have private road usage?
It is not just that. Weapons. Drugs. Terrorism [1]. Pornography depicting rape.
[1] Includes accelerationism. France just had a terrorist attack on a synagogue. Germany had one on a city festival. Could be related to either. We don't know!
And yet, with all above being said, as much of a cesspool Telegram is, I much rather have such centralized there than in an application with group E2E encryption. But even then, every once in a while you want to scare the herd to demotivate their (criminal) effort, just be careful not to flock them to a better alternative. Which is a real risk.
There is a principle in the free world that one is not criminally liable for the speech of others. This is the principle that allows ISP's, newspapers, web forums, Google, etc. etc. to exist. You demand that the principle be violated and the Internet be destroyed. I disagree.
Because we want to, and we can. I don't get how HN consistently fails to understand the actual social and political process by which regulations are made. I constantly see this argument which effectively boils down to "if you ban a thing, you will also need to ban everything else, which is absurd, so you shouldn't ban anything". But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.
It is open to society to decide that Telegram is more proximate to the harm being caused, and less otherwise socially useful, than an ISP, and on that basis punish the former but not the latter. (It is also reasonable to argue that Telegram is not sufficiently proximate to the harm and that it is sufficiently socially useful that it should be allowed to operate, and honestly I sympathise with that argument more. But my point is that it is a matter of weighing social harm vs benefit and not just a technical analysis of "where the bits go".)
If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Arguing "ah, but by that logic you'll also have to jail the guy who sold the robber his breakfast" isn't going to cut it, and rightly so.
Bad analogy.
Better one is that your a taxi driver and someone who committed a crime hops into your car for a ride, then you’re found guilty by association.
> Is there a check box to state that you are a criminal when you message someone
I assume they'd could check for specific keywords or use perceptual hashing for images etc.
This is the principle behind, and popularize by, Nazism and Soviet-style communism. In short, it is the arbitrary use of force against whichever targets the ruling bureaucrats deem to be "socially harmful". This principle leads inevitably to mass murder and war, as history has shown repeatedly and without exception.
You seem to fantasize that you'll be in the in-group who gets to decide who is harmful. But then one day it will be you who is considered harmful. And the state will sacrifice your life for the "benefit of society".
No fantasies here, the state does plenty that I disagree with. But the idea that societies can regulate harmful conduct is not really that controversial outside of HN and a few other particularly libertarian bits of the internet.
It's certainly the principle behind most governments. But not all. The one shining exception is the United States of America. That government was founded on an entirely different principle, the principle of individual rights. This principle says that man, due to his nature, has rights that no one else, not even his government, is allowed to violate. These rights are not granted and revoked by government, but protected by it. And if the government violates those rights in a significant way, it is a person's duty to overthrow that government. This was a truly radical position in 1776. Unfortunately, it is still radical today, and little understood.
If you'd like to learn more about this, google the "Declaration of Independence" or "The Rights of Man" by the philosopher John Locke.
That's far from a uniquely US principle. See, for example, the European Declaration of Human Rights.
The US places more emphasis on individual rights over the rights of the community, which is its prerogative, but the US is an outlier; most liberal democracies accept a little more restriction on individual rights for the good of the community.
You can argue it either way, but a lot of US commentators seem to get outraged that other countries might have a different viewpoint.
No, that is by your own logic, not GPs. GP clearly said: "You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit.". Considering that ISPs do something about that activity, by GPs logic, owners of ISP should not be in jail. Am I worng?
He doesn't say that doing "jack shit" (not exactly a fleshed out legal term) will remove that liability, as you are suggesting.
What about toilet paper? It's used by quite some criminals (not all that said: many criminals have very poor hygiene and just put their undies back on without wiping after number two).
Should we arrest people manufacturing toilet paper?
Anyway we all know it's not about criminals: it's about controlling speech so that protests as in Barcelona, the UK (where people who are denouncing rapes and killings are put in jail, while the actual rapists get very light sentences like only six months in jail), etc. cannot organize themselves.
It's about controlling the narrative.
And they're using useful idiots resorting to broken logic to push their totalitarian agenda.
Despite what the article says, Telegram is not even a nominally end-to-end encrypted platform. You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform.
What do you mean by this?
It's a major pain for gen z
Speculative. We don't know why he is in jail. Maybe his lawyers know why, maybe not. Maybe the prosecutor knows, maybe not. We don't know if there's a case. There's hardly anything we do know.
My take is he doesn't reply to LE requests related to CSAM. That is one of the few things we (as in: our governments) don't like anywhere in the world, and Telegram is known to respond slowly to [such] requests. But I won't pretend I know for sure. Cause either way, it is a neat honeypot compared to technically better protocols.
Telegram is structured like a mix of a social network and a blogging platform. You find people you trust and read them. Sometimes they would repost someone else and if you like what they write you can read them too.
https://www.ft.com/content/c5d40e3c-9f9c-43dc-a467-1c713b40c...
That makes me wonder if Telegram was always a Russian spook op and its [ineffective] banning just a ruse.
I don't think any of the major platforms are independent of some spook oversight.
With Telegram, as you say, the Russian ban (somewhere around 2014) could have been designed to signal that Telegram is not run by the FSB.
This arrest, on the other hand, could have been intended signal that Telegram is not run by the CIA.
There have been a couple of house searches, extradition orders and YouTube bans all in the last two weeks for pro Russian commentators. I always wonder if these individuals are genuine or actually working for the U.S. gov.
Anyway, together with the latest crackdown of the EU on Musk all these events could be genuine and not staged.
after watching Carlson's interview with Durov have come to think he may be the genuine article. Very interesting bit his relating us agents trying to recruit a dev and pushing some specified but alas unnamed oss libraries to use in Telegram.
(And btw, I'm unaware of anything that exists that is a 'spectrum' apart from the electromagnetic spectrum. To have the quality of being a spectrum, the subject must continuously span a 1-dimensional space. It's a way overused metaphor, in my opinion, especially for political positions which are anything but 1-dimensional.)
So you correctly identify that modelling it as a one-dimensional spectrum is a gross over-simplification. Then conclude that as it's not a one-dimensonal spectrum, it must be a binary property? Rather than accepting that reality is more complex than is easily captured in common language?
I can see how you made that interpretation but that's not what I was saying. Free Speech is an ideal (not a binary property). I doubt that that you will find any human society with a system of laws that puts absolutely no restrictions on speech. That still doesn't mean that you can talk about Free Speech as a 'spectrum'. It's an ideal that ppl strive for, to varying degrees and across different domains. (Perhaps similarly to how Truth is an ideal that ppl strive for; Truth is not a 'spectrum'.)
It also happens to be an ideal that ppl will vigorously promote in certain domains, while betraying / discarding it in others.
There is no need for the label, other than to serve this purpose. We already have long existing words for what is lumped under so-called 'hate speech', such as bigotry, or invective or slander. But they don't contrast so neatly against Free Speech as the invented (subjective) label 'Hate Speech' does, which is why it was (only recently) coined.
My point on spectrum wasn't relating to free speech but rather free speech regulation.
Open discourse is universally recognized as a generally good thing for society.
So, we can try to embrace Free Speech ideals even as we grant our government right to censor some speech and draw (a somewhat arbitrary) line of what's allowed.
We've seen Russia, for example, abuse that power even though free speech is written into their constitution, they use that power to censor political speech and what they refer to as blasphemy, so we know this power can and has been abused but it's also possible, so, perhaps, you are right.
Plus, people aren't really obliged to love one another or their institutions. Why should I pretend, for example, that I respect some dead Iron Age prophet and people who follow him like sheep?
And yet anti-religious speech is usually perceived as hate speech by the religious folks on the receiving end.
The laws are (usually) defined by the people of a country, based on their idea of morality, and are totally in their right to reject blasphemous stuff or whatever. It's their home, after all.
The only thing non-negotiable, to me, is that the Declaration of the Human Rights is universal and no law, anywhere, should go against them.
There is no single "Europe". I have seen many women sunbathing topless in Denmark - it seems to be totally acceptable there. Haven't seen that in France - but it has a very strong nudist culture dating back at least to the 60s. Some of these nudist beaches are actually famous e.g. Cape d'Agde.
If the thing they want to delete is run by an entity that has a physical presence in that country, then they -- unfortunately -- have the right to get that material deleted.
For better or worse, we are all bound by the laws of the place where we physically reside. If we want to do or allow things online that are legal where we are, but are illegal in other countries, then we shouldn't visit those countries.
It doesn't matter if anyone "endorses" repressive governments in doing their repressive things; they are legally able to do those things to people physically present within their borders. That's just the reality of the situation.
France claims Durov allowed stuff that's illegal in France. He went to France, so France has the ability to punish Durov for his alleged misdeeds. It doesn't matter if we think that's right or wrong; that's just how the world works.
How is a channel "against the law?"
Do you mean access to the channel is creating opportunities for lawlessness that simply wouldn't exist otherwise? I'm not sure the French justice system has demonstrated that it has exhausted all options other than to handcuff a CEO of one particular platform.
If they do observe it, and the platform owners are responsive to taking down illegal content and/or providing information on the participants, then likely law enforcement is satisfied with that.
Telegram does not do that, and does not shut down the illegal behavior. The problem isn't that illegal stuff happens on Telegram, the problem is that Telegram won't help law enforcement when that illegal behavior is found.
They are not; however, required to prevent certain people on a prescribed government list or criteria from owning or using a telephone or from dialing certain numbers.
> won't help law enforcement
So it's not because a "channel is against the law."
Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life
1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private
and family life, his home and his correspondence.
2. There shall be no interference by a public authority
with the exercise of this right except such as is in
accordance with the law and is necessary in a
democratic society in the interests of national
security, public safety or the economic well-being
of the country, for the prevention of disorder or
crime, for the protection of health or morals, or
for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
What might be essential right to human communication might suddenly become "illegal" according to the government.
So there should never ever be, under no circumstances, even the code and infra to be there to provide backdoor/censorships, otherwise it _will_ be abused by limiting people's communication in the moment they literally need the most.
There’s a lot of false dichotomy in the ongoing discussions here which assumes there’s a binary “control to the gov” or “freedom for all” choice. It’s a spectrum where at the most basic level, a robust process to handle reports of illegal activity should be accepted.
There are only very few illegal things that can happen within the telegram app like fraud, or minor abuse. Those must be reported by end users and individual actions can be taken against them.
What the government is asking is a massive backdoor for surveillance in the name of preventing crime, but they decide what they can monitor. It is a pandora box and if you open it there is no going back. Even if the current government is asking it with purest intentions and manage it well, the same can not be said for any next elected governments.
1. "I think it is perfectly fair for governments to take down large channels that are clearly against the law"
Telegram obviously acts upon such requests Here in Italy I cannot access the channels of RIA and Sputnik, obviously a request was made to Telegram on behalf of EU /Italy, and Telegram complied.
2. I think that you, in your US bubble, which you THINK guarantees free speech, misunderstand yourself what Telegram is. Right now, it is the ONLY wide audience platform in the world, where Russian people can freely (as opposed to, say, HN) write what they really think. And it is true as much for the people who are "pro", as for the people who are "against Putin", (I use these nonsense labels to adapt what I write to the general american level of "understanding" Russia).
That's a very common misunderstanding (even among Americans) of what the First Amendment actually guarantees: It protects you from government censorship of speech, but does absolutely nothing to compel private individuals or corporations to carry your speech. (In fact, compelled speech has been ruled to be a violation itself.)
That absence of such legal protections can definitely be seen as having a chilling effect on free speech in practice, but as I interpret it, currently the assumption seems to be that legal intervention is not necessary due to market forces achieving the same or a similar outcome implicitly. There's also strong resistance from a value perspective against the idea, since these provisions themselves might be incompatible with the FA for reasons mentioned above.
You can definitely have some discussions around whether additional "duty to contract" rules should apply, e.g. in the same way as there's a law in Europe that makes it illegal for banks to not give somebody a bank account in certain circumstances, but nothing like this exists at the moment.
> Right now, it is the ONLY wide audience platform in the world, where Russian people can freely (as opposed to, say, HN) write what they really think
Hackernews has always been very strictly moderated to maintain a specific type and culture of discussion. By necessity, that excludes certain types of comments. In that sense, it's always been very far away from a "free speech platform".
The French article mentions:
Why was he under threat of a search warrant?
The Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable numbers, cryptocurrencies...) makes him an accomplice to drug trafficking, child-crime offenses and swindling.
(From the reuters link)
Or does it refer to public channels only?
No, not yet.
> Or does it refer to public channels only?
On Telegram channels and groups are not E2EE. I'd assume that's were most of the crap is spread.
You can get a warrant (a court order) to open a piece of mail, and the USPS isn't going to refuse to hand it over.
[technically they could, but someone would get stuck with contempt of court charges]
Having said that I am no fan of installing law enforcement inside private companies. However, telegrams noncompliance with court orders is problematic particularly related to protecting human rights of 3rd parties in the digital age.
It's however a very very very slippery slope to prosecute someone for providing the tools to hold encrypted communication, just because this is also used by criminals. A lot of privacy oriented services would probably have to exit France if this holds up
The problems is the huge telegram channels spreading hacks and illicite tricks.
There is no such threats against Signal which is way more privacy oriented. (except for some new laws in UK where Signal said if they are applied, they would withdraw from the UK market:https://fortune.com/2023/07/13/signal-president-mass-surveil...
On the other hand Pavel Durov is "homeless". He is like a normal citizen.
It depends to what they're being asked to be compliant with.
There is now also https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/telegram-messaging-app-...
This isn't Slayers X.
But on a serious note if he's a billionaire then he can drop the whole monetization schtick. Telegram has become unusuable in the last few years. There's crypto scam ads everywhere.
So you cannot really blame Telegram.
I’m asking because, at least according to my understanding of YouTube’s ad policies, that shouldn’t be allowed: https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/14009787?hl=en&r...
Screenshot (title has changed from what I wrote earlier or this is another ad): https://imgur.com/a/TX0xB9y
Country is the one in Europe.
Maybe this is not a scam and therefore is allowed? Maybe it is a joke video? I didn't watch the video, but the title and thumbnails looks like a "scam".
[0] Every time I mention using AI my posts get downvoted to infinity, so take the above with a grain of salt :)
I don't know anything about coding crypto, but it looks to me like it has a bunch of functions which each return a little hex string which it merges together into a wallet address which it then transfers all your funds to. I could be totally wrong and it's all above board.
Here's the code from the video:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xc02aaa39b223fe8d0a0e5c4f27ead...
Maybe it's best to keep the original one. I think everyone here knows how to use Google Translate or ChatGPT.
Very interesting to see where it will all go.
I don’t understand how they’re going to convince French judges that he’s guilty for not being able to decrypt chats that he has no keys for…
With the context that you omitted it makes more sense:
Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with
law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable numbers,
cryptocurrencies...) makes it an accomplice to drug trafficking,
pedo-criminal offenses and swindling.As for moderation, any post in public or private groups can be reported to moderators. As for one-to-one chats, this might not work, but you should not be chatting with random people anyway.
It's just they're the current power structure, so they can get away with the state monopoly on violence et al?
Except he (or his corporation) has keys for almost all initiated chats on the Telegram network. Only the private chats are E2EE and they're not default and rather inconvenient because they don't sync between devices (unlike Signal's E2EE chats).
> To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data.
> Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people's privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.
But if it was so weak then various intelligence agencies wouldn't be bothering with it
So we actually don't know if it's weak or not.
There is a difference between can't and won't.
They just make it hard to force them but they could if they want to.
Proper encrypted message can't be decrypted no matter how much they want to.
When the limitation is not technical, your only guarantee is the integrity of the operators and the lack of interest of your attackers coercing the operators into spying on you.
In Telegram's case one could easily assume that the Russians and now the French said him "Nice fortune you built, you are very successful person with a long life to live ahead. It would be a shame if you lose your fortune or spent your days locked in a room instead of flying on a private jet to Ibiza"
If I have to guess, I would say that the authorities would be interested in identities of some users and access to private group chats with shady stuff and Telegram would be able to provide these.
These are probably already available to the Russian intelligence considering the low radiation levels in Pavel Durov’s blood stream and no novichok experience.
There are lot of direct laws about record-keeping (company accounts for instance) but there are also a lot of laws which indirectly impose requirements of record-keeping, because having records will be the only way to comply with the requirement (tracking of origin for food recalls for instance).
France almost certainly has a law that says that if you run a telecommunication service, you must respond to court orders with the following information: X, Y, Z & W.
If non-compliance with such a law is the basis for the arrest, it will be his damn problem to convince the judges, that despite being subject of many such court orders, he had a stronger legal basis for not keeping the necessary records to comply.
However, my money is on Al Capone: I would be very surprised if the charges do not (also) contain tax-evasion, securities fraud, money laundering.
That false statement is refutable trivially: Just perform the mud puddle test [1] in front of the judge (and a cryptographer explaining the implications to the judge).
[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/05/icloud-w...
> I wonder what caught up with him first: the undisturbed sale of hard drugs vIa telegram, or the undisturbed recruitment of freelancers for GRU's terrorist attacks across Europe.
Seems there could be some truth to the accusations.
Telegram's policy is apparently to not moderate anything, and ignore law enforcement requests.
I'm not saying Telegram is right or wrong here, just that their behavior may not be legal in places like France.
Cant say I have good things to say about Telegram founders and operators. Its not some innocent "free speech" messenger app, its sinister
As for those South Korea-related stories, the blame is partially on the government. For example, an operator of a website selling illegal videos got only 18 months in that country [1].
100 times yes. So where are laws and regulations for the money?! Oh wait. They exist :)
I thought Reagan beat that with his war on drugs? Obviously flippant comment, but wouldn't it be more appropriate to say "Te....chnology has single handedly responsible for the recent drug epidemic,", to which I would answer 'No, it's always been about dollar bills, and what 'recent' drug epidemic?" The US opioid crisis wasn't fuelled by telegram.
Reagan in South Korea? Are you reading only half of the words in each sentence?
Well, if this guy starts damage controlling, this is definitely a CIA operation
People are complex creatures.
https://x.com/SamidounPP/status/1827062901364208099
So not sure what's the non-cooperating about banning "terrorist" content is about, since various info channels definitely were getting blocked on telegram in EU over the last year.
I can't for the life of me as an EU "citizen" even figure out who asks for these bans on behalf of the EU. Kinda doubt it's someone in my country, because it's reported as EU wide ban in this case. Maybe it's done by some overbearing country on this particular topic, like Germany, and Telegram just blocked it EU wide, for some reason.
My pet tinfoil-hat theory is that he decided that staying in a French prison is safer for him than being out in the open and get some polonium, or whatnot.
Why would he get some polonium? There are endless official Russian state telegram channels. Putin clearly has no issue with it or he would have banned it.
Politics is complicated.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-telegram-ban-idUSK...
This is probably the most ridiculous theory I’ve read all year.
FWIW, France do not extradite its citizen and Pavel Durov is french. He may have been arrested but that doesn't mean he will stay in detention depending on the nature of the charge and his eventual cooperation. Who knows, maybe he called before landing in France so that he was arrested and seen as cooperative.
People do that.
Recently, the Bulgarian drug lord nicknamed Brendo not only surrendered, but somehow bribed border control to let him in the country so he can show up directly in front of Sofia Central Prison, with a duffel bag, ready to be taken in. He wanted to skip the bureaucracy and go behind bars ASAP.
In addition to drug trafficking, he is accused of collaborating with an organized crime group, covering up for pedophiles, fraud and money laundering.
I don't know how reliable this is, but I've seen in 3-4 sources that he's arrested for terrorism, child abuse, drug trafficking (not providing data to prosecutors).
Good luck with that. And that's a seriously big issue. Moderators (and "moderators" in Telegram mean an alleged team of people they hire to moderate all content in Telegram - if you report content, the group administrators won't even be notified about that so they can act by themselves first) in most cases won't do absolutely anything.
There is a feature that can be enabled to create an end-to-end encrypted chat between strictly two users, but most people do not actually use it.
Telegram is largely a social network masquerading as a messaging app. There is a deep network of “channels” that interlink with each other to provide a community for users. None of that is encrypted.
The secret chats presumably are (if you trust Telegram). Secret chats are 1 to 1. So anything outside of those that most people on Telegram access (massive channels and groups, smaller groups, private groups and channels) is NOT encrypted.
The article claims that "Contacts and calendars are built on industry standards (CalDAV and CardDAV) that do not provide built-in support for end-to-end encryption." but it seems like a weak argument. Nobody actually cares what protocol is used between a device and a cloud.
> Deputy Russian State Duma Speaker Vladislav Davankov said he had sent an appeal to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to seek Durov's release.
> "His arrest may be politically motivated and a tool to gain access to the personal information of Telegram users. This must not be allowed," the state-run RIA Novosti news agency quoted Davankov as saying.
[0] https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/08/25/telegram-boss-pave...
It is basically the part of the current politics in EU where they are trying to force access to all encrypted traffic across devices.
Fun fact: the Russian government and high ranking officials are outraged by the arrest and are asking the Russian state to pressure France into releasing him.
It's one google away. Before you blame this one on Russia too.
Since they’re not, this doesn’t seem much different from e.g. an email provider refusing some court access to somebody’s mail archive (i.e. a very bad idea if your executives ever want to set foot in that country).
I’m really having a very hard time finding much sympathy for an operation that kept endangering users by spreading misinformation about its own security model, while at the same time building a jurisdiction-hopping warrant evasion machine to protect data they arguably shouldn’t even have if that security model were accurate.
The accusations are serious enough that it’s probably reasonable to assume that they have some serious evidence for this and if that is true then this is a good outcome that should be celebrated.
Presumption of reasonability in political prosecutions doesn't exactly have a great track record.
I remember when the GoF tried to blackmail a Wikipedia admin with prosecution threats, to coerce them to censor Wikipedia entries it didn't want people to read,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5503354 ("French homeland intelligence threatens a sysop into deleting a Wikipedia Article (wikimedia.fr)")
I’m just saying to slow down and wait for details to come out. This thread is turning into a paranoid fever dream based on nothing as far as I can tell.
Assumes facts not in evidence.
Isn’t it equally reasonable to assume the accused is innocent until proven guilty?
There have been govt commissions in the UK, France, the EU, and the Netherlands about getting Telegram to act on their reports.
All of this while Durov is bragging in Russian press that he doesn't need more than 3 moderators.
If you're not aware of what's really happening here, I'd recommend not commenting.
This guy is a legit a-hole. There's bots on Telegram where you enter women's names or social media URLs and you get back if someone ever posted revenge porn about her. Those bots remain online until a journalist covers them. Unless the company is publicly humiliated, no Telegram channel is ever taken down. Telegram has been the go-to platform for hosting malware and stolen data for half a decade. Nothing... NOTHING has ever been taken down even if it's a blatant TOS violation. So yeah, fuck Durov!
However, I could imagine him staying in custody while being investigated for a couple days, then quickly facing some level of judge to decide whether he has to stay in jail or can be released.
Once this is done, don't expect a formal trial until multiple months (and most realistically, at least a year.)
He's gonna have a very miserable time. Flying private jet --> watching another man shitting next to you.
I don't know if that counts as "due process" for everyone ?
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2024/08/28/le-pdg-de-...
I think the original link mentioned exactly that, and it would be done over the weekend
That seems very unlikely. I don't think France has a statutory number of days in their speedy trial right, so even if you demand trial as you walk in the door, for a serious trial of this size, with this many charges, my experience is saying one to two years for trial.
Now, France does have more rights on pre-trial detention, so he might be able to get some sort of bail, but he's an enormously high flight risk, so.. maybe not.
I always found that guy's story of living 'in exile' from Russia a bit suspect. And now Russian government officials are calling for his release.
Need more information to make any kind of judgement. What I'm pretty sure of now is that this probably has nothing to do with encryption.
It has nothing to do with ordinary sorts of “bad” content either like hate speech or crypto scams or whatever. All of that can be found in abundance in many places, all of which are still online.
This is about something else. Note the standard cast of characters with certain well known alignments rushing out to defend him.
My top guess is direct involvement in scams, money laundering, CSAM, etc. I mean direct participation, not just running a chat used by others for these things.
My second guess is the upcoming election. Telegram was a big vector for coordinating the January 6th riots. Maybe there’s a network being taken down here.
Don’t know, will have to wait and see.
Direct involvement with scams? You got to be kidding me. This guy is worth 15 billion USD, he does need to do anything.
It's about lack of cooperation in censoring content.
I have no knowledge about this and make no assumptions about whether or not he is involved in any kind of financial misconduct - but there are many cases of very rich people doing risky and illegal things to further grow their wealth, despite already having more than enough money.
It's about the contacts and the advance inside knowledge.
Circling back to an alledged "pedo web ring" ala, say, Epstein .. the big pay off wouldn't be connected to "services" and charging access to view materials, the real money (if any was being made) would be in "blackmail" and "quid pro quo" investment infomation etc.
Once a few whales are landed, say past and future POTUS candidates, C-Suites of mega tech companies, bankers, etc. what limit is there on making money from tips in exchange for keeping a few secrets?
I have zero knowledge re: the Telegram founder and any of this, but history is littered with rumours of elite clubs, cosy finnancial arrangements and getting away with the breaking of convential rules. (eg: one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_paedophile_dossier)
Durov's exile is also somewhat tenuous: https://tjournal.ru/tech/52954-durov-back-in-ussr https://lenta.ru/news/2017/03/20/durov/
This is sort of forgotten now but there was the time where they censored the Smart Voting bot.
I don't think going after Durov personally is justified, and the charges should just be contempt of court if anything. But I don't trust him.
This is false. Telegram's non-secret chats use MTProto 2.0 Cloud. "Encryption is off by default" is a false claim.
Maybe the parent content meant E2E is off by default, which is what your first link states:
> Secret chats use end-to-end encryption, thanks to which we don't have any data to disclose.
Then the next paragraphs elaborate about the non-E2E encryption, and how would it be harder —- while not impossible —- to disclose data.
From the same link you shared:
> Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government or block of like-minded countries can intrude on people's privacy and freedom of expression. Telegram can be forced to give up data only if an issue is grave and universal enough to pass the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world.
Maybe getting the CEO of the company arrested is what it gets to disclose that data they want. After all he controls infrastructure and deployments.
Meanwhile, unlike Telegram, everything in Signal is E2E by default[1].
The only context where client-server encryption matters is when I want secure e-commerce, or to shield from my ISP what searches I make or what I do on sites.
You should have started and finished with this.
Why would anyone want to innovate and develop privacy technologies if this is what happens? So, your best bet is to work with government agencies if you want to work on this tech? What if the government isn’t one you agree with? No one has good answers for these, but criminals aren’t the only ones who need to use privacy-preserving tech.
According to the TF1 link, the charges being brought against him are
1. No moderation and refusal to cooperate with government forces on a bunch of cases (what you are describing)
2. Tools allegedly catering to criminality (burner phone numbers, cryptocurrency transactions...)
Note that for now, no judgement has taken place yet. So none of this has been determined by the judicial system to be illegal.
France can and will charge anyone on its territory no matter what passport you hold.
Right but they don't want to deal with them either. They'll deport someone and ban them from entry (which can often be done essentially at will) rather than putting them through the whole legal process and potentially dealing with protests from their country of citizenship.
In fact, in Illinois there is a specific statute to cover this. The Dept of Corrections can simply dispose of someone's sentence and hand them to ICE for deportation. I knew a Mexican guy who had a 6 year term and I heard from him 6 weeks after he was sentenced -- he was back with his family in Mexico, having had his sentence terminated and quickly deported.
For more complicated stuff, quite the opposite.
Yep, TOR is not a solution for hiding from western governments. That's why anything large enough out there gets wrecked as soon as someone makes an appropriate decision.
> Telegram offers end-to-end encrypted messaging […]
Yes, just like McDonalds offers salads and other healthy food options.
I don't know anyone who uses TG "secret chats". (I tried to convert one friend but then there was some buggy stuff that also lost us long chat history so we reverted)
I use a single secret chat, probably because I was conditioned by the early https era to like the green lock symbol
Telegram has also tried to distance itself from TON crypto token, but it is so obvious how it still serves the original Durov's vision and controlled by a team of founders (aka initial token holders), now proofing their stakes for a supposedly decentralized blockchain to operate.
It's not a wise idea to run "uncensored" messenger where a lot of shit happens and also offer it's users built-in non-government-surveilled payment methods.
By "clear rules" I mean not something vague like "you should not cooperate with criminals" (does "criminals" include not yet convicted criminals? does it include Trump? what is "cooperate") or "you should not allow illegal content" (what is exact definition of "illegal"? how can a person declare some content "illegal" without going through the court?).
They have de-emphasized the built in token and payment features, and Mobilecoin has tanked in value, but it’s still there and still works and nobody has been even detained over it, much less prosecuted.
Even ProtonMail which wrongly claims to be a privacy safe heaven does so!
The lack of E2EE is actually what has got Telegram in trouble.
The same stuff that happens on Telegram also happens on WhatsApp and Signal - but because it's E2EE, it's harder for the police to find it, and when they do find it, WhatsApp and Signal have no way to comply - they can't see the chats! That said, they will provide details to LE that they do have access to (e.g. metadata) - of which WhatsApp holds a lot more.
In Telegrams case with public groups sharing illegal content out in the open - this is viewable to LE and they request logs from Telegram for their investigations. This stuff is publicly viewable on and to Telegram. Telegram can remove it. Telegram can provide chat logs to LE - but they refuse to. This is why they're in trouble.
Moral of the story - if you want to start an internet service - you either go E2EE no knowledge, or you moderate your shit and cooperate with LE, you can't avoid doing the latter unless you're doing the former.
I've always been under the impression that as long as your country has your back, you can refuse law enforcement requests claiming their government or their laws are bad so you don't have to comply.
For people in tech
Can you honestly claim that you keep in touch with those people?
I mean, this is an english-speaking us-centric forum. It is somewhat atypical for people here to actually know what happens outside this bubble.
Nope, but maybe the data below can shed some light on it:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
But in contrast, I have read lot of news about Durov.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
Interestingly (and understandably I guess, given the original nationality of the current CEO), the Ukrainian military are mostly using Signal, and the Russian military almost exclusively use Telegram.
Also, doesn't the Ukrainian military also use Telegram quite a lot ? (And what about the Israelo-Japanese Viber, also very popular in Ukraine?)
it is hosted on Dutch and Western servers, and most chats are not e2e encrypted, especially group ones where you coordinate things like that. They are just incompetent and sloppy to use it for military, which probably already suffered for it greatly, but all the data was flowing unecrypted to closed-source servers in the Western Europe this whole time, so this has no new implications for anything.
Maybe because their legal compliance strategy is something other than "we will only, and only possibly, comply with law enforcement requests if it concerns terrorism"?
To quote Telegram's from https://telegram.org/privacy:
> 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.
So yeah, Meta takes it really seriously. It doesn’t work perfectly because the scale is mind-boggling, but it’s probably the best system of this kind at this scale, and it is constantly being evaluated, red teamed, and improved.
Source: I used to work on FB Groups.
There are a large number of highly active Ukrainian channels on Telegram, all about as anti-Russian as you would expect. There are Ukrainian government ministers operating channels on Telegram. How does that occur on a "Russian controlled medium?"
I don't speak either Russian or Ukrainian. I know none of these channel operators. Yet I've been granted approval on a number of "private" Ukrainian channels. Certainly a Russian could as well. Why wouldn't Russia's state actors, given that they enjoy "control" of the medium, shut it all down?
Also, there were previous instances of cooperation when Durov himself admitted it in his memetic "...or full cesation of Telegram operation in Russia" survey.
- https://www.senat.fr/leg/tas22-148.pdf page 43 bottom, or searching "réquisition de toute personne"
- https://www.senat.fr/leg/pjl22-569.pdf with a good intervention from an LFI MEP, Ugo Bernalicis who is DEFINITIVELY worth to hear https://youtu.be/PDG9V01jPUs
Just to cite the relatively recent more stunning move. But there was many in the less recent past (starting from police surveillance, impunity and so on) not counting the current delay to DENIED the last legislative elections results...
Looks like a better alternative to all that centralized drek.
[1] https://turan.az/en/politics/putin-refused-to-meet-with-pave...
Telegram: client source code shows e.g. all group messages are always shared to the company
Signal: client source code shows end-to-end encryption is always on for every message.
You pretending reality isn't real is really telling.
Also Telegram conveniently appeared when WhatsApp became popular and it was the spitting image of WA back then. Typical Russian IT economy where all they know is how to copy. First Durov copied FB to VKontakte, then he copied WA to TG.
> Why was he under threat of a search warrant? > The justice department considers that the lack of moderation, lack of cooperation with law enforcement, and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) make him an accomplice to drug trafficking, pedo-criminal offenses and fraud.
This isn’t some grand conspiracy theory.
>This isn’t some grand conspiracy theory.
Funny that when the wrong country does it it's tyranny. When a Western country does it it's the rule of law.
Especially when they are the exact same thing.
If not, this is just whataboutism.
I can't think of any, to be honest.
That said, even in democracy a law can be bad, and likely is in this case.
I like Telegram, a lot, but if you're ignoring the fact that large parts of it openly function as a mall for criminal services (and it's 100x easier to find that stuff than via Tor, for example) you're not being honest with yourself. A lot of people here are just reflexively assuming its mean cops vs encryption because that's an issue tehy personally care about, and ignoring any other context.
North Koreans doing crimes in US are also very safe.
Free - doesn’t mean do whatever you want.
“Liberal democracy” my ass, the West is a police state. Carl Schmitt was right.
In contrast, Signal does not have access to any chats or user information (except the timestamp of when users last logged in) and could not be forced to wiretap.
If all the chats are e2e encrypted then the government will arrest you for designing chats in such a way that a backdoor is impossible
Like we say in Russia, "as long as we have a man we can find a law to imprison him"
Couldn't they just quietly release an update, under a threat of a 20y jail time, or just $5 wrench? Any centralized solution is vulnerable. The only real solution is open source serverless p2p network.
e.g. Keet (although currently 99.9% open sourced; not yet 100%)
seems like the prosecutorial, sacrificial lambs in internet platform space are those who are big enough to afford private jets but not too big to become faceless. hope he has a decent judicial insurance in place.
However... the same governments, and here I'm talking primarily about the one I know the Netherlands, has absolutely ZERO accountability against severe human rights abuses. You will get absolutely nowhere trying to hold government abuse accountable.
In the Netherlands, it took around 25,000 victims before any kind of traction was gained and primarily due to one politician, Peter Omzigt. And others turned against him.
Even now, you have princess Laurentien coming under heavy fire for trying to help the victims of the government abuse here.
So infite powers and less than zero accountability? No thanks. It's actually less than ZERO accountability because attempting to hold someone accountable will bring you under attack.
You don't even need to go as far as to talk about government lack of accountability for their own.
The French government has shown numerous times they don't care about that, anyway. We protected actual pedophiles slash rapists like Roman Polanski from being judged for crimes they committed in other countries (in this case, the US) but we are to arrest the man behind telegram because think of the children? does that compute?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski
> In 1977, Polanski was arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for a probation-only sentence. The night before his sentencing hearing in 1978, he learned that the judge would likely reject the proffered plea bargain, so he fled the U.S. to Europe, where he continued his career. He remains a fugitive from the U.S. justice system
""Justice"" is a very relative thing. The western democracies want you to believe it's fair. Ha. Ha.
It’s really chilling to see the steps EU gobs are taking against free speech. In some ways they seem more authoritarian than even China and Russia. It’s like “free world” is becoming a farce.
Considering how he's tarnished Signal, there is absolutely no reason for them or anyone else to back him up.
What will be very funny is the fact that Telegram is pretty much not encrypted (yeah ok, "secret chats", whatever sure) and now that investigators probably have access to Durov's phone, that lack of encryption might come back to bite him in the ass. Can't wait to know what they find and if they do find something, it might be interesting to see if he finally changes his stance.
Basically only Signal + Whatsapp.
> claiming they don't do anything for privacy.
Well, Signal is kind of a scam in that regard.
Mandatory phone number exposure? (or did they finally implement usernames?)
A joke of a "registration lock pin" instead a proper 2FA to protect against sim-swap?
They received $3 million from the open technology fund, which is a government sponsored fund for censorship circumvention projects. https://www.opentech.fund/about/congressional-remit/
tl;dr: Lots of claims, lots of support.. but very little to back it up once you scratch the surface.
people in this field tend go overboard with security when really nobody cares about what they have access to.
What did he have to say about Matrix?
If you don't uphold the principles all you have to do is wait until it bites you too.
What happened to "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Nothing. It still is the same fake Voltaire quote used to con overly idealistic adversaires into giving you some situational supprt against their better interest. No institutional actor ever followed it.
So was Moxie - or do we forget that Signal is doing cryptocurrencies too?
Yes, that includes people from Russia, China or the US believing they are the ones who are truly free, and everything else are totalitarian shitholes. Each one of them is even kind of right in their own regard.
In Russia, China or North Korea - nobody believes that.
Well of course, they're all actually super miserable and are secretly begging the government of your country or her stronger allies to liberate them and wisely lead to a glorious bright westernized future.
Don't be naive. It's probably worth exploring where'd you get such a maximalist idea in the first place and measure just how much empirical evidence you have to back it up.
No, they are not.
Nobody in Europe disappears for six months because they have offended the government before mysteriously reappearing like in China. No one dictates single handedly what’s going to happen without any form of oversight like in Russia.
Heck France currently has an interim government because they voted out the previous one and the US had a decisive election coming in a few months.
The people who want to convince you otherwise generally have a vested interest in undermining democracy and pushing for a form of autocracy.
Not even close. You are just poorly informed about the situation in Russia or China.
HN: NO! free speech.
Sincere advice: get out of those libertarian echo chambers, and think about real consequences.
IF you let LEO's access group chats THEN you absolutely need civilian accountable honest transparent clear oversight to avoid mission creep.
The task isn't as clear cut as "known criminal is part of OC groups", there's a clear Sorities Paradox asking when does an OC group chat become a neighbourhood watch | knitting group chat.
If our criminal of interest is part of RealMafiaChat, PrepperLifeStyles, CamThePolice, GuideDogsForVets, etc. etc. et al. then how many of these should be surveilled .. and how many other group chat members should also be surveilled ?
Yes. Take down real criminals.
Yes, it's an actual problem that real innocents get swept up Kafka-esque for being unwittingly criminal adjacent.
What's the cost benefit number and trade off for actual innocent lives ruined?
I am pretty much against surveillance in the form of drag nets, but none of that applies here. Instead, this is exactly how a functional state should work.
(And note that no exceptions are made for Pavel because he is rich and well-connected. Contrast that with brittle countries where politicians rely on tech billionaires to fund their campaigns.)
I sympathize with you being an Aussie; I can see where your allergy comes from, but in this case it is misplaced.
Yes, functional states should have extremely good oversight .. in reality they "mostly do" but with cracks that allow unwanted behaviours to sneak through and sometimes become normalised.
eg. recent revelations that SASR types are "blooding" new members with unsanctioned kills in war zones. Or regular joe LEO types using surveillance powers to stalk ex's. Or total innocent gets railroaded by tangential "evidence" simply because they chance to tick all the boxes for a needed arrest and the actual perp was overlooked | unseen.
> I would be very concerned if your knitting grandma was an active member of a drugs and arms dealergroup.
And yet an actual sergeant at arms type of an organised biker gang based in Australia used knitting terminology key phrases in just such a group to organise international transfers of "packages".
The person in question was a NZ background stone cold killer with a special forces background.
( Yes, most crims are "dumb" | "lazy" and yet a good few understand covert messaging, not all can be caught with a fake encrypted phone honey net trap )
These are all real concerns and examples of things that have actually happened.
This is also why the US did not inherit a real, solid concept of personal privacy. Instead, ordinary people are increasingly becoming sort of property of corporates. You can see that if you contrast the Rheinland model (state reigns in corporates, protect people rights) with the Anglo-sphere, which is much more suited to a few select capital holders extracting value from the workforce (compare holiday allowance, fire at will etc).
This doesn´t mean that in Europe the Rheinland model is not under active threat, far from it. And look at collective self harm: watch this space (HN) if the EU sometimes takes measures against abusive monopolies. It is a very difficult fight.
FWIW I really like Telegram, I hope it will get cleared up soon.
Moderation is hard, and HN actually does a pretty good job all things considered.
Edit: it's already back.
(I'll never agree with HN's title-editing bot though. That thing's cray).
You can have end to end encryption without a phone number. To require it means you're opening up possibilities of State and location tracking.
What about Messenger and Whatsapp, also end-to-end encrypted?
Will they be arrested?
Is this the end of end-to-end encryption chats?
Signal by design can't moderate their service. Telegram by design has full access, but doesn't act on it.
Me: >Also Telegram is not E2E by default. You need to activate it per chat. By default and in groups it is only server encrypted.
But if it was fully E2EE, would this arrest not have happened?
Me: >Also Telegram is not E2E by default. You need to activate it per chat. By default and in groups it is only server encrypted.
That's what I read
- Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, was arrested in France after arriving from Azerbaijan.
- Durov was detained at Le Bourget Airport by the Gendarmerie des Transports Aériens (GTA) due to a French warrant.
- The warrant was issued on claims of Telegram’s lack of moderation and cooperation with law enforcement, making Durov complicit in crimes such as drug trafficking, pedophilia-related offenses, and fraud.
- Durov’s arrest was contingent on him being on French territory, as he is listed in the FPR (wanted persons file). Unclear why he decided to land there.
- Durov is now in custody and will face a judge, with potential charges including terrorism, drug offenses, complicity, fraud, money laundering, and pedophilia-related content.
- Authorities believe Durov will likely be placed in pre-trial detention due to his substantial financial resources and perceived flight risk.
- The arrest aims to pressure European countries to cooperate on law enforcement efforts against crimes facilitated through Telegram, particularly terrorism and organized crime.
This is why I don't really care that Telegram doesn't do E2EE by default. Most of my chats aren't that interesting and in my threat model it's good enough.
I just can't make sense of these serial entrepreneurs otherwise. Thousands of similar apps were launched which were the same or better than those ones. Why were these ones allowed to gain traction? Why these people were chosen?
Whenever I've met people who've had success in tech, it was clear that there were some weird dynamics behind the scenes which made them act in ways which were highly counter-intuitive and often involved sabotaging their own projects in some ways.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-commission-to-staff-switc...
>The European Commission has told its staff to start using Signal, an end-to-end-encrypted messaging app, in a push to increase the security of its communications.
> Of course he is complicit. I imagine most people in tech would argue the good outweighs the bad, but to provide E2EE without any backdoor is to turn a blind eye to the horrendous things for which some people will use it.
> There has been a constant in the tech community, since forever, of stupid idealism. For example, I remember the apoplexy when Napster had to stop facilitating mass piracy. Yeah, what a head-scratcher that was. And now the tech community has convinced itself that E2EE without a backdoor is some viable. Your neighbors won't consider the overall harms worth the benefits, and neither will their governments.
PGP is more than 30 years old. What do you mean by "now the tech community has convinced itself that E2EE without a backdoor is some viable"? What is "now"?
Email concerns to mods at hn@ycombinator.com
Though yes, this thread is overall quite low quality. Sigh.
Throwing these people to jail horner, preventing them from wine and dine in destinations they actually want to go to, that puts a price they have to pay personally.
We need to do more of that.
He'll make a deal.
Why do you want your country to control what you can see, read or say? Why do you want your country to have access to your private thoughts and opinions? Stop being a coward and fight this fascist overreach. And spite yourself if you support it.
No no, I want my country to control what other people can see, read or say. Not me: I'm a good person.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws." - Tacitus (Roman historian)
"Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime." - Lavrentiy Beria (head of Stalin's secret police)
You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.
The “people nearby” feature is literally “find me a dealer close by”.
I don't use this feature as I don't really want to send my precise location to Telegram but I can imagine it being in someone else's usability complain against Signal, too.
Considering how everyone reporting their actual experience with Telegram here is downvoted to death, it seems to really hurt some users to actually consider that maybe the reason Durov got arrested is because Telegram welcomes criminals with open arms and does absolutely nothing to moderate the platform.
I’m sorry?
Operating a platform facilitating crime on a large scale is a very valid reason to arrest someone.
The uberisation of drug dealing is a major issue in France right now and striking Telegram would be a huge blow to that.
Obviously legalisation would be even better but that door is shut due to the US influence on international treaties.
Not saying you’re wrong, just that it’s not something in your face and you need to actively search for this (now that I know this exists, it took me a minute to find it).
From what I'm hearing through the grapevine (from people who actually use Telegram for this), some of the dealers on there actually use bots to take your order / address. You can't really do this on any other messaging app, at least not easily.
WhatsApp is a good corporate puppy of the West; Signal is a crazy nothingburger that recently burned its reputation by going into cryptocurrencies; Matrix, like with all FLOSS, has approximately zero users and is way under the radar of authorities. Still, you do occasionally see talk and moves against the first two.
I'm in France. I use Telegram extensively for chatting with friends (1:1 or group chats) because its UX was vastly better than any of the alternatives when we started a few years ago (stuff like polls to decide when to meet, location sharing to find one another in a crowded place), custom bots, being able to edit messages to fix typos, etc. Nowadays WhatsApp does those too, but UX is still worse, especially on non-mobile.
Meanwhile I know people buying drugs off WhatsApp.
I know absolutely no one using Telegram as a chat app however. Pretty much everyone uses WhatsApp for everything here.
Hi, pleased to meet you. I have around 15 people I only chat with via Telegram just in France.
In our company all of the work chats are on Telegram although it's 100% legal, audited, and does nothing wrong. It's just the most convenient way to communicate. We use Slack only when some client heavily insists on it.
Still possible to access with VPNs, though.
If Telegram did actually prioritize private and secure communication, they would indeed be just a data pipe and nothing could be shared with law enforcement.
What details are you assuming Telegram are sitting on, besides the data law enforcement already collected?
Durov got arrested for insufficient moderation of public channels, so my guess is that law enforcement would be able to get exactly the same data as Telegram themselves sit on.
But it's hard to get a full picture without it going to public courts, for now we can only go on what's being reported.
Message contents (vast majority of TG chats are not E2EE) and additional metadata seem pretty desirable?
I believe it's as incorrect as arguing the United States wants to ban or own Tik Tok because China has access to Americans private data.
Whether the US has sincere reasons for proposing a ban is a station that has by long been passed. If your point is that "social" media is mainly a tool in the hands of tech elites, whose main business model is social upheaval and where foreign influence is up for the highest bidder (troll farms), then yes, I agree that we should have a broader discussion of what we as democratic societies expect from those profiting from information chaos, distrust in societal institutions, outrage, and advertisement clicks.
Parasitic tech elites and their tools of influence in the information sphere have nothing to do with free speech -- in fact they kill a fair debate among equal citizens in a democratic society.
And that is a sudden change because… lack of censorship in matters that affect Israel and Ukraine. This is not a distraction.
Anyone who does not want that, should stay away from Telegram in the first place - an app that stores all your private messages unencrypted for the company to read. All your interactions on any channel ever - all their data. All this is about is sharing that data with the western governments. The russian government already has it for example.
With the situation in Ukraine being what it is, wouldn't they be cracking down on Telegram usage in their country if this were true? They don't seem to be doing so, and the usage seems to be quite high.
https://www.ft.com/content/b1e76905-29f2-4ac0-99e0-7af07cef2...
this is false, it's kind of funny you are using all caps to lie. Something that resembles what you described may happen in November, but doesn't exist yet.
I am pretty staunchly pro-privacy, but this arrest has little to do with
> permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc)
It is about drug sales and extremism, that last one being about alt right / anti-vaccine crazies / terrorism, whatever else extremism du jour.
You are very mistaken. Democracy requires defense. Everyone can have its own stupid opinion, but that is not the point.
Actively sabotaging society via campaigns is something any sane democratic society should defend against (all western "social" media are relentlessly hit by troll bots and disinformation campaigns, funded by your favorite dictatorships like Russia and China).
It is no wonder that Twitter for example got in the hands of Apartheid Musk.
The paradox of tolerance, read it up. It is a __paradox__.
With that vigilance, it helps to be able to accurately assess the problem. In this case, Durov wasn't arrested for non-Western aligned subject matter. He was arrested for tacitly allowing drug trade and extremism on his app. Yes, Telegram is deleting many of these groups, but it is a token effort at best.
If Telegram ramps up the moderation of these efforts, perhaps the charges against Durov will be dropped. But if they continue to allow these whilst upping the moderation against.. say.. pro-Russian groups, Durov stays jailed. Hence, accurately assess the problem, and choose to work on it.
For what its worth, I lean libertarian with a progressive bent, so in my book anything that is not overly dangerous should be allowed to be communicated.
- Weapon sales? Probably not.
- XTC sales? Go ahead.[0]
- Nutella boycot? Go ahead.
- Infiltrating a local government to sabotage it? No.
[0] Yes, I am fully aware drug production funds violent organisations and there are tonnes of externalities like chemical waste dumping. That needs to be fixed via legalizing, it is not an inherent problem of drug sales.
(Do not take notice that China vaccinated their own people though, or the cognitive dissonance might be too much).
__
1. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-china-covid-disinformation-ca...
So yes, the alt-right is an anti-democratic extremist group.
As for anti-vaccine groups, their contribution to the death toll of past pandemics is no secret to any moderately informed person.
As for what happened on January 6th, it was in practical terms a concentrated bit of aggressive protest theater, and far from anything seriously resembling an attempted coup. You'd have to be deluded by ideology to call it something so serious. For example, that event was much smaller than the enormous amount of government property damage and calls to topple governments made by a much larger number of people during the earlier Floyd protests across the US and other countries. Would you call those extremist too?
In any case, by naming the most radical actions of a certain subset of a wider belief system as a reason for considering all aspects of that wider belief system as extremist and worthy of banning, you're just another garden variety autocratic monkey at heart, looking for ways justify banning whatever concept doesn't fit your tribal identity.
By your ridiculous logic, any belief system could be justifiably banned because in some ambiguous way, it's "responsible" for the specific activities of certain people who hold to its most extreme version, though the two things (a wider system of beliefs and specific people's active choices) are separate.
They gathered in front of politicians their houses in large groups, sometimes even with torches, hoping to scare even the kids inside the house.
They sent myriad of death threats.
Totally not extremist.
Seems like you're the one living on a different planet.
That basically counters ur whole point
„Putin and Telegram Founder Durov in Baku at the Same Time“
TL;DR: Five Eyes is pissed traffic is encrypted and they don’t have a back door.
However, Telegram might be involved in cooperating with criminals; for example by not deleting channels related to protests against government at govt's request, by not blocking channels of allegedly spreading misinformation Western media like BBC. This is indeed illegal in Russia.
Requiring a phone number most certainly isn’t some fool proof method in the way you are claiming.
No source on what the warrant is about though.
FWIW I really like Telegram and pay for it, I hope it will get cleared up soon.
A channel was created on Telegram by a government propaganda journalist, where they basically dox every activist, posting their addresses, phone numbers, and other private details, at times when these details are actively used for beating people to near death. That's the only content that Telegram channel produces.
I was one of the people whose details were posted on that channel. My phone number, home address, etc., were posted there, along with the private details of tens of others. I contacted Telegram support multiple times, we mass reported the channel - not once have I gotten an answer, and the entire channel is still up, for nearly 4 months.
So, hearing that he's arrested for lack of moderation? Good. I'm very happy. Hope he learns a lesson.
EDIT: Country is Georgia
The veracity of this claim aside, posting this as a reply to someone who just shared their own experience getting doxxed in a country where victims have legitimate grounds to fear for their lives... feels a little out of place.
Also, usually the dictatorships abuse the censors once their grasp is firm. Until then, they're typically abusing the lack of censorship for their own ends. We see that here in the US with troll farms abusing limited content moderation around misinformation to sway public opinion with falsehoods. Countries are trying to pull the US election in both directions right now this way.
They should pick a bone with their country’s government that allows such thing to happen, not Telegram.
I do agree to some extent. Having tools to challenge a dictatorship that cannot be silenced can indeed become invaluable. However, there is a significant difference between responsible moderation, which aims to protect individuals' safety, and full-blown censorship. While it can be a slippery slope, the absence of moderation shouldn't leave users defenseless against doxxing and threats, which can have real, harmful, and even deadly consequences. There must be some form of balance. From my experience, it feels like Telegram lacks any moderation whatsoever, which represents another extreme. I assume, though, that they must be enforcing some level of moderation for things like CP, since governments typically, really do not tolerate a no moderation policy in such areas.
I would say that being on this extreme end, Telegram has actually opened itself up to government scrutiny. If there had been some form of responsible moderation, governments might not have found enough grounds to justify their actions. The absence of any moderation means that governments can use full force and indeed justify it, potentially damaging the very area of free speech that Telegram aims to protect.
> help I'm being harassed online [detailed description of how]
> tsk tsk, and you think that justifies *censoring* people?!
Not counting the pro-Israeli channels posting details of anti-genocide activists and encouraging violence (and sometimes openly putting bounties on activists' heads). All constantly reported yet no action is taken.
There have been so many things this guy has allowed for years, believing he could act (or fail to act) with total impunity because of his fortune. Hell, he got offered a French passport because Macron used to be a big Telegram fan (might still be). It's absolutely incredible he was so brazen he would just travel to France because there is absolutely no way he wasn't aware he could be held liable (especially considering recent EU legislation), he probably just believed he was above the law.
We don't use Telegram for communication, or at least it's strongly advocated against, including by me - because I've always viewed Telegram as malicious. There's a longstanding belief that it's E2EE, while it's only so under special circumstances, and Telegram holds the keys. I view insecure defaults as malicious, especially when you're advocating the network as very secure. So in the end, dissenting voices have no use for the tool and only the government does.
I do agree that prosecuting the owner is quite a big deal, but France has the rule of law. Durov faces up to 20 years in prison. While I don’t wish for him to be incarcerated for that long, if this situation serves as a wake-up call and prompts him to reconsider his app’s approach to moderation, it could be a win for everyone.
However, during protests, the government sometimes jams the network, or perhaps the cell towers simply fail under the load of thousands of people in a concentrated area - rendering Signal unusable. Consequently, we needed a peer-to-peer messaging solution, but couldn't find a suitable one. During the protests, we were essentially left without any means of digital communication and had to rely solely on verbal one.
We couldn't use Briar due to the mix of iOS and Android devices here. Cross-platform compatibility is a must. And we never got Bridgefy to work at all in our tests.
With more protests possibly on the horizon depending on the outcome of the October elections this year, I'm on the lookout for a cross-platform messaging app that can function without internet connectivity. If anyone has recommendations for such an app, or other suggestions, please share them with me :)
How can it possibly be "a propaganda tool" when it has no feed, no algorithms, no suggestions or recommendations? You only get sources you've willingly subscribed to, nothing else.
This reads as such a cope.
Your own head should be your filter. This is literally craving for Big Brother.
> so it can be filled with lies and propaganda without any response from the platform
So does any other platform with the only difference being that it's the "right" kind of lies and propaganda that would also be shown down your throat with the rest of your feed. The cope is real.
> only if it is russian government making requests
Says who?
> Your responses remind me of russian bot playbooks, tbh. Are you one?
Well of course they do, and of course I am. Everyone knows that everyone who doesn't share your opinions and perspectives in 2024 isn't even worth of being considered a human being, duh!
IMHO people unfairly come on you about your expectation for moderation.
What often happens is, you lose your anonymity and get personally attacked by people in position of impunity.
That should not be a thing.
Pavel Durov tries to play the “victim” to create a legitimate image for himself and Telegram.
So I don't follow how you've made a connection between Putin and (Putin's?) "(fake?) victim" Durov.
[0] https://docs.pyrogram.org/faq/what-are-the-ip-addresses-of-t...
Does this Matsapulina realize, that when you install Telegram on new phone, you just need to confirm the phone number and all your chats are restored on that new device? So for authorities to read her chats it's just a matter of intersepting an SMS with the confirmation code?
Of course, I suggest everyone to assume the software they use may be compromized.
But let's not post trash articles. In the article's own words, "conspiracy theories, paranoia, and speculation".
There is no info about why exactly he was arrested but it looks like that French police had a warrant for him.
But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
If it is real, it would really be the same kind of political crime abuse on an individual of the same level as what happened to Julian Assange.
I can easily guess that assholes in secret service would probably like very much to use that to blackmail him to add backdoors to telegram. So sad.
Do you unironically believe it's not already backdoored for Russian government?
Also, it is clear that Durov is a dissident and personally experienced and run away of the dictatorial state. So I think that it is probably one of the tech personality that I trust the most in the world.
I'm not sure that counts as an impeccable track record.
I'm not even going to mention how many people were arrested over telegram messages in russia.
Fun fact: Telegram at some point was blocked in Russia for not giving FSB access to data. Later telegram was unblocked and is used extensively in Russia. It's not hard to figure out why it was unblocked.
If you're implying it's backdoored, that's a wild mental gymnastics you made there.
No hate, but your comment is speculative in nature.
Saying Russian government would give a shit about people opinions, funny joke.
After a while they just stopped trying and decided that it's less reputational damage to just let it be.
That's not true. It's legally unblocked. the reason why it was unblocked was never published. "It was unblocked because they gave up" is just your interpretation of the events. Pretty naive one, in my opinion.
When something newsworthy happens in some region, all messengers get blocked in that region for days, Telegram included. They don't care about collateral damage to other websites then.
https://storage.googleapis.com/gsc-link/cbe9d20e.html
I doubt they explicitly say to themselves, "Today I do evil for fun and profit.". I wonder what their rationalization is.
Yes. You should read the history of Durov and why Telegram was created in the first place.
The very reason why France is not happy is that because they cannot get access to private chats and stuff. EU was (and is) pushing for the end of E2E encryption after all (it failed this time, but they will try again).
Durov created Telegram because the russian government was trying to take over his original social network - VK (basically imagine USA gov taking over Facebook). Thus he sold his shared and left the country.
I do find it hilarious to see apologists of government over-reach like you.
What did I say that made me an apologist for government overreach? I recommend users use Signal? Your accusation is unfounded when I was complaining about a lack of encryption.
Governments don't go after services that they can access freely.
Can you point to the relevant part of the comment?
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1780355490964283565
I know that TuckerCarlson is a polarizing character. My posting of this link is not any kind of statement for or against him or his politics. That being said, the interview really gives an interesting picture of Pavel Durov IMO. If you can ignore Carlson's annoying tangents into American politics, you get to hear a good bit of Durov's life story straight from his mouth in reasonable detail. I came away from it with a more positive picture of Durov and Telegram.
Obviously there’s client security, potential backdoors, unencrypted backups, and many other things to worry about. But I don’t see a scenario where it fares worse than Telegram, and many where it’s significantly better.
As long as enough people click that checkbox, law enforcement has access and Meta/Apple are out of the news without having lied about or hidden anything.
I also can’t tell if you’re being sincere. I was under the impression that Telegram was considered significantly less secure than Signal and that the matter was mostly settled. I’ve been seeing the following talking points repeated for years now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/signal/comments/xk1jdw/comment/ipbv...
To people arguing against this, Russia's Sovereign Wealth Fund RDIF has an ownership stake in Telegram after co-raising with Abu Dhabi's Mudabala in 2021 [0]
Either way, Telegram is at the whims of MbZ, and if the UAE ever needs something from Russia, they'll use Durov and Telegram as collateral. The UAE's done the same thing with Pakistan (Musharraf, Nawaz Sharif), India (Dawood Ibrahim), Israel-Palestine (Mohammad Dahlan), Serbia (Belgrade Waterfront Project and Mohammad Dahlan), Turkiye (Mohammad Dahlan), etc.
If the Telegram founders were truly opposed to Russia, they would have immigrated to Israel, the UK, Germany, Netherlands, or the US like most business dissidents in Russia. If VK wasn't stolen by an oligarch, they would have remained in Russia to this day.
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-23/russia-mu...
Yes as Telegram was banned in Russia for a long time (or at least they tried) before giving up.
The fact of Durov getting arrested could be also used for propaganda purposes (no free speech in the West).
It had already happened with extreme humiliation of responsible agencies.
> as Youtube is being banned now
It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)
It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.
> Telegram is the last popular application where you can find the content about war, protests or elections that govt doesn't like
Clearly you are not in touch with people in Russia and have never actually seen their social media. Or just being dramatic.
> It's not banned, it's throttled because google kept abusing backbone networks once their CDNs had started to burn down and claiming that this is totally fine and fixable with direct BGP peerings with ISPs (yeah, right)
> It works just fine on mobile internet connection where traffic shaping is an inherent feature and it only works like shit on broadband where ISPs are only capable of sending TCP RST once the queue is over the limit.
This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:
curl --connect-to ::speedtest.selectel.ru https://manifest.googlevideo.com/100MB -k -o/dev/null
curl https://speedtest.selectel.ru/100MB -k -o/dev/null
Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled is outdated and incorrect. Nowadays mobile connections are throttled as well.
The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible. Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?
> The information that all ISPs voluntarily decided to throttle Youtube is implausible
> Also the information about mobile connection not being throttled
Why are you trying to build a strawman? That's not what I said. I've said "google kept abusing backbone networks" (e.g. IEXPs), which obviously means it's a matter of the Main Radiofrequency Centre, since it involves nation-wide infrastructure - not some "ISP volunteering".
And I’ve never said that “mobile connection is not being throttled”. In fact, I am stating exactly the opposite, pointing out that traffic shaping is an inherent feature for a mobile ISP. In contrast to broadband, where no one bothered with deep traffic manipulation before, so an ad-hoc throttling solution (yes, typically simply reusing existing law enforcement integrations) works like shit.
> This is not true. The connections to googlevideo are throttled by government-operated DPI, not by ISPs. You can verify this by sending following request from a Russian residential or mobile IP address to a Russian hosting provider Selectel:
One does not need a synthetic test such as yours. One can simply try playing a video from the same browser, switching connection between broadband connected Wi-Fi and a mobile hotspot and notice that broadband doesn’t seem to be working properly, but mobile actually works, even if it’s not Full HD. How come? Does your hypothesis regarding “not by ISPs, but by government-issued DPIs” explain the variance in ISPs behavior? No, it doesn’t. Just as it doesn’t explain why “blocked” YT seems to be “blocked” completely different from your typical weed growers forum. It works differently from how you imagine it.
> Why would they throttle the speed to allow their competitors to lure away their clients?
Speaking of which, apparently some broadband ISPs are now trying to implement throttling properly to give them an edge over the competition: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6919868
The Communists lied to us about Communism, unfortunately they didn't lie about the West.
It was still better than what happened to the USSR between 1993 and 2000 when the West won the cold war and dictated surrender terms.
What has changed since then?
I think this might become a future for most of the countries; China and Russia are just several years ahead.
Maybe they also understood that if you can't defeat them, lead them. Currently, Telegram has a lot of pro-war, pro-Kremlin channels.
And how exactly do you think it got unbanned?
Their "encryption" used to use an in-house algorithm (in house algorithms almost always are vastly inferior to standard ones) and even today encryption stores the keys on their servers (in Russia...) and E2EE has to be enabled per-conversation by hand.
By end-to-end encrypting messages, but uploading backups to Google Drive and iCloud, and in a non-end-to-end encrypted way by default, WhatsApp (and iMessage, which does largely the same) have quite cleverly maneuvered themselves out of that potential source of legal problems without cutting off law enforcement access entirely.
Telegram is a backdoor by design. The server has complete access to all your messages, they can do whatever they want with those.
And they even had a backdoor in E2EE chats, see: https://habr.com/ru/articles/206900/
This is in contrast to Facebook or Twitter. Those platforms will absolutely take down content that is offensive or criminal in nature.
> Reporting a channel
> Open Telegram > Open channel > Select channel name (top) > Report > Select the report reason
> If you need to report content by email
> Address it to abuse@telegram.org with a subject like “Report user @username”
In desktop app you can simply click right button on the message or click three-dots menu in the top bar and there will be an option for report.
The have moderation teams because they are required by law. These are outsourced to the lowest bidder. They are so overwhelmed by the amount of that content.
Watch those documentaries about the psychological traumas inflicted to those that moderate Facebook content.
The political establishment doesn't want the proletariat having journalism that reports against the wishes of the powerful or of regular people having free speech to be used against the government.
No ethical person should take part in enforcing these laws.
This is not even remotely true. I have reported content many times and when I come back to check it, it's gone. This includes account of spammers, some sellers (or pretending to be) of illegal goods, etc.
> But it looks like it is because that he is accused of being an accessory of a lot of things like traffic, drugs, pedopornography, anything bad you can image because he would not have done anything to combat that on Telegram.
This very article says that it's because Telegram doesn't cooperate with authorities in handling illegal content (which it is legally obligated to, to operate in France) and provides services to facilitate illegal activities (crypto or throwaway numbers).
It's in the "why was he arrested" section.
So if these things happen in WhatsApp or Signal we simply don't know about it.
And instead they arrest the CEO of a company that provides a mechanism for people to talk to one another.
Arrest all postwomen.
>we've got to save democracy by restricting free speech and enforcing laws and regulations created by unelected officials
> Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.
> The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
> The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.
> The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.
Modern day EU, is a sharing of power structure over the EU between France and Germany. The institutional seats for the EU are in Brussels, Frankfurt, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Poland and the UK wanted Turkey to join the union to provide voting balance against Germany and France. This didn't happen and France made it clear that they'll never agree to it. The UK left because of this imbalance (despite having special privileges).
One way to think about the current EU in medieval terms: A personal union between France and Germany; and a bunch of associated vassal states.
The UK had a very beneficial (for the UK populace) position. Disinformation campaigns fueled by oligarchs and Russian money got the population to score an own goal. Gains for the few, destruction for the others.
But as one of those wealthy politicians said, "at least the fish are now happy".
I keep bringing it up since people forget about it: in 2006 the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive that forced all ISPs to save the browsing history of everyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
It was eventually declared invalid by the European court of human rights, but it was still in effect for many years. Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.
The EU's attempts to spy on people go back decades. You'll also note that government gets exemptions from all the privacy stuff the EU pushes.
I hope the EU changes course on this, but as with their handling of other tech... I'm not holding my breath.
[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/early-hints-and-encrypted...
Typical modern law enforcement incompetence. They don't care about you. They just want to protect their access to your data.
This is funny because the secret service abuses citizens' privacy in Romania all the time. But this turned against corrupt politicians which is probably why they sued. The secret service wiretapped them and gave the recordings to the anti-corruption directorate which was then led by the current EPPO chief prosecutor. Some high level politicians ended up in prison after much friction, but in the end a few heads had to roll in order to at least give the impression of fighting corruption, which the US Embassy and the EU asked for.
Romanian establishment parties would vote anything that comes out of the Comission. CSAM? They will vote for it. The opposition is basically Kremlin funded right wingers which were barred even from joining Viktor Orban's conservative group and two small parties like Macron's, one which didn't get any votes and the other has like three MEPs after making an alliance with two other small parties. If the right wingers vote against CSAM it's just to sabotage the EU decision process.
Mike Benz, a former insider, spends his days explaining how this works.
This is not the best introduction that he has done, but it is the latest space he recorded on the Telegram affair:
https://x.com/mikebenzcyber/status/1827514567884255430
Update: there will be a part two on the „The Geopolitics of Telegram & who is really after Pavel Durov“ 1am ET tonight.
This is going to be one of the best sources of background info on the subject. This is not some random conspiracy theory hack, I promise.
We don’t expect our politicians to dedicate their lives to scientific research so this perspective is inherently flawed.
What? Not in the commission. It's a 100% politically appointed body made up of politicians, it's just not elected.
Also even on the lower levels being an "expert" EU apparatchik has absolutely nothing to do with dedicated your life to science.
In any case it's a deeply flawed system, minimum oversight and a lot of money to spend/waste can't ever lead anywhere good.
It's clear the EU's mindset is "nobody can compromise your privacy except me, but it's OK, I'm benevolent", and I'm not a fan of that exceptions.
To clarify, I like the GDPR, and wish the EU would give us more of that and less of the surveillance.
Same with their attempts to make the data export to the US legal.
Safe Harbor, Privacy Shield, etc. They try and try but fail every time because it's always the same just a different name.
Hopefully that prevails.
At any rate - the mass surveillance effort is just an idea pushed by some MEPs/comissioners... it would be nice to be able to dimiss those.
Besides, there was also a complain about "cookie" banners but the UE didn't mandate to make annoying popups - the intent was to force services harvest less data... as it shows - if the law is not explicit enough then private business will try to circumvent it and push users to hate the entity/the law ('buuuu, stupid EU'... no - it's stupid and abusive corporation). At any rate I do hope that there will be push to make the configuration a browser setting akin to "DNT" with various levels ("allow all cookies", "only functional", "no cookies"; maybe more) and make websites follow it...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41341607.
p.s. No, this is not a comment on the EU or any of your views—just about unsubstantive/flamey forum posts.
It's registered as a separate company, but they even share some office space.
Has been this way for decades and shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
His Telegram channel is somewhat odd. It's a mix of what you'd expect (updates / general stuff about Telegram), some slightly weird stuff (highly praising countries he visited or talking about his oh-so-high-quality sperm and how he's the biological father of "over 100" kids), and then there's just shilling for some random watch-ads-to-get-coins things or whatever that totally aren't scams built on Telegram's new mini-app thing and TON (which is Telegram's cryptocurrency that they can't legally sell as theirs). You can take a look for yourself here: https://t.me/s/durov
2) "Praising countries" aka focusing on increasing the reach of Telegram, similar to Zuckerberg with Facebook.
3) "biological father of "over 100" kids" is quite the mildly interesting fact. It's unsurprising for an individual in his position to be a little eccentric.
4) "shilling for some random watch-ads-to-get-coins" aka focusing on increasing engagement with the Telegram app ecosystem that directly benefits Telegram.
All make sense to me.
„Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which demotes overheated discussions, account or site weighting, and moderator action.“, see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
<https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...>
It's not perfect, but it really does often correctly identify flamewars. If you feel a post has incorrectly triggered the flamewar detector, email mods at hn@ycombinator.com.
As I write, this thread doesn't trigger the criteria.
Hope he rots in jail