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.
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.
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.
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.
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.