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Comment by hnpolicestate | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to respond to some of the commentary here. We truly exist mentally on different planets. The West wants Telegram destroyed because the platform permits the sharing of information and ideas that are in opposition to Western domestic and foreign policy(Israel, Ukraine, China etc). This is in addition to the West not having a backdoor to Telegram and not having it's servers on Western soil.

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.

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You are distracting from the issue: when law enforcement infiltrate into criminal telegram groups (drugs, child trafficking etc), they are for once doing their fucking job by ordering the platform to give them all the details they collect, so that they can come after those criminals.

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.

> ordering the platform to give them all the details they collect, so that they can come after those criminals.

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.

So he was... but there's this coincidence... https://nitter.poast.org/RALee85/status/1827459553526448307#...

The person who wrote the text in the screenshot (a typical sensationalist "milblogger") most likely is not informed enough to realize that this software was written in Berlin, hosted in the Netherlands and its code is continuously audited and gate-kept by Apple which can throw them out of the Appstore for non-compliance with local laws any second. It has most likely survived for a whole decade in the West by cooperating from day 1; any data of interest is already being handed over to whoever is asking, otherwise they would have been banned from the stores many years ago. The only reason why it is still being used by the military is incompetence: believing the hype that it's "safe" and lack of alternatives.

Let me introduce you how 1-1 chats are not encrypted by the default, that this option is quite hidden, that many/most Telegram users don´t even know about "private chats", and that their particular hand-rolled encryption scheme has been questioned by encryption experts for many years.

> What details are you assuming Telegram are sitting on, besides the data law enforcement already collected?

Message contents (vast majority of TG chats are not E2EE) and additional metadata seem pretty desirable?

I think this is projection. Claiming the arrest has to do drugs and child trafficking is distracting from the issue and the actual reason for the arrest. Which I outlined above.

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.

China itself has banned TikTok as-is from China, because its deems it as a negative for society. In the mean time it has served for spreading disinformation inside the rest of the world.

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.

> for once doing their job

And that is a sudden change because… lack of censorship in matters that affect Israel and Ukraine. This is not a distraction.

> Why do you want your country to control what you can see, read or say?

No no, I want my country to control what other people can see, read or say. Not me: I'm a good person.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear : )

When everything is illegal, nobody is innocent.

Nice reference!

Reference to what? Didn't I just coin it?! Aw, it sounded so good, too...

Not sure what you referred to directly, but GPT-4o gives me these two similar quotes:

"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)

Ah yeah, the general sentiment was definitely "there are laws that everyone breaks every day, so they can always get you on something". Mostly because I remembered the anecdote about the USSR outlawing fax machines that no business could do without, so they could always charge any business with a crime.

I thought you altered the phrase spoken by the villain Syndrome in Pixar's "Incredibles" movie: https://youtu.be/GYmHYQPaHaw?feature=shared

Ah, no, I didn't even remember this, but it's close.

If you really want to start a flamewar you can also casually mention the fact that Telegram also gives CCP major headache cause they don't control it and it's actually popular (unlike Signal) in China.

How is it not banned in China?

It is: https://www.mactrast.com/2024/04/whatsapp-signal-threads-and...

Still possible to access with VPNs, though.

Telegram is totally blocked in China

I can't comprehend how ensuring people other than me can read, see and talk about whatever they want is starting a flamewar. Like I said, I just exist mentally on another planet. Maybe universe.

Telegram's data centers are located in USA, Netherlands and Singapore

Why does it matter if staff with access to those servers are in Russia?

who told you that?

Telegram staff are all living in Russia, this is not even a secret.

Core team members are living in Dubai

Hey, get away with your facts and logic. It distracts from OP's agenda.

"Why do you want your country to have access to your private thoughts and opinions? "

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.

> 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.

Why should they crack down on Telegram? They tolerate it, as long as the high profile channels are broadcasting pro russian points of views. (everyone above a certain viewer size MUST register with the state, that goes for any site)

He's saying why would Ukraine tolerate Telegram if it was so Pro-Russian? Since he's saying it directly leads to their conversations/data being handed directly to the Russians

I did not say Telegram is pro russian. Pavel Durov certainly isn't that much - but he still made a deal with them in order to be allowed to continue operating there.

https://www.ft.com/content/b1e76905-29f2-4ac0-99e0-7af07cef2...

> everyone above a certain viewer size MUST register with the state, that goes for any site

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.

https://news.sky.com/story/russian-bloggers-forced-to-regist...

haha this is so ancient not a single person or channel i read even remembers this. Canceled in 2017, i guess the cancellation part has not been as widely reported (probably not as exciting for sky news to report that) https://old.rkn.gov.ru/news/rsoc/news48342.htm

When your idea of a sensible argument includes things such as "but think about the children" or "stop being a coward" then I think you should reconsider how you communicate your thoughts.

Didn't signal and WhatsApp support e2e encryption better and by default? Last time I checked didn't find telegram to be superior in the encryption space.

That basically counters ur whole point

Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs. The main use of Telegram in France is supporting illegal activities. The page allowing you to discover channels in your neighbourhood was clearly designed to facilitate that. Telegram has basically no market share as a chat application here outside of that.

You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.

What prevents people from using Signal or Matrix to distribute drugs, besides serious usability issues?

Signal or Matrix don’t openly advertise channels next to you selling drugs from directly inside the application. Telegram does.

The “people nearby” feature is literally “find me a dealer close by”.

Or "find me a hook up close by", "find me the notification channel of a nearby protest" (mind you, this actually happened in Hong Kong in 2019). But yeah, what you said also makes sense.

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.

“find me a hook up close by” literally means “find me a prostitute nearby” which is also illegal here and is indeed present on Telegram.

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.

Apart from the fact that, in my years of using Telegram as my messaging app, I have never seen any of the "easy access to drugs" screens people here seem to find: an easy way to find drug sellers is a boon to law enforcement. This cannot be a reason for going against Telegram.

> This cannot be a reason for going against Telegram.

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.

I mean if we punished platforms for what they 'facilitate' we might as well just shut down the internet

Power grid and roads

If it is illegal, why cops don't use this function? They actually should be grateful to Telegram for making it easier to find crimes.

Like two weeks ago the WSJ reported a big expose on how Instagram permits users to sell drugs using paid advertisements. I guess Zuck will be arrested shortly after Durov? I can't believe these comments are in good faith but dang says assume so. Smh

As a lightweight user, I had literally no idea what you’re talking about.

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).

It's also really easy to integrate with as a developer, the bot API is genuinely one of the best and easiest-to-use APIs I've ever had the pleasure of interacting with.

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.

"Find me a dealer close by" is a sure way to get scammed. I'm not saying you cannot buy drugs on Telegram, just not via the location search.

> You don’t see “the West” whatever that means go after WhatsApp, Signal or Matrix. That should tell you something.

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.

> Most of the people I know use Telegram to buy drugs

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 also know people buying drugs on WhatsApp but you need to get the contact by another mean. You can’t find it inside WhatsApp.

I know absolutely no one using Telegram as a chat app however. Pretty much everyone uses WhatsApp for everything here.

> 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.

Not in France, but same experience here. Telegram has by far the best UX and clients of any chat app, so that’s what I use with my friends and family.

That's weird because it's really a convenient chat app and unlike WhatsApp, works equally well on both phones and desktops (Whatsapp works great on phones but desktop client sucks, Skype in it's old days, worked fine on desktops but totally sucked on phones, Telegram was the first app that did both well).

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.

The ship has already sailed years ago. Suddenly, everyone is pro-censorship, you just have to say the magic words like "hate speech", "terrorists" or something with children. The media became a mouthpiece of the government instead of asking critical questions. It wasn't like this before and it terrifies me. The people will only see the damage once it affects them personally.

I think you are living on a different planet.

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.

Do you believe everything that is written down?

If our democracy is as robust as our leaders advertise it, it should easily cope with extremism, anti-vaxxers and system opponents.

This is about identity theft like selling credit card details, meth and child porn (telegram deletes 60 thousand such groups. Per month. It's a shitpile that attracts flies, evidently)

Sure. And Tik Toks attempted ban is about Chinese surveillance.

If the rule of law is robust, we should abolish the police.

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__.

The paradox of tolerance isn't real. Laws are real. Someone could argue for whatever they want. If the law says it cannot be implemented, it doesn't matter if they win an election. It's just about the law.

Democracy is not a spectator sport. You have to be vigilant for it through the years.

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.

That fact that you think that "alt right, anti-vaccine crazies" are extremist is the best example for not wanting people like you be able to censor anything.

You should send an invoice to China, that fueled mistrust about vaccines via disinformation campaigns in the west on "social" media . [1]

(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...

The alt-right is directly responsible for the attempted Coup d'État on the capitol on Jan 6. Project 2025 vows to replace any competent officials with partisan sycophants. Mr. Trump said to his electoral base that if he is elected, they would "not have to vote ever again".

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.

So because some people choose to express their democratic right to disagreement for their own reasons, and this includes doubt about vaccines, the idea of being against vaccines should be treated as extremism to be forbidden? If that's your interpretation of how personal rights and free expression work in a democracy, then I fear for the direction of democracy with idiots such as yourself guiding policy.

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.

In my country the anti-vaccine groups incensed each other so much that at one point they started burning down cellular ("5G") towers, causing reduced availability of emergency services in rural areas.

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.

How can you call "alt-right" and anti-vaxxers as "extremism", and especially compare it to terrorism?

Seems like you're the one living on a different planet.

I don't see how you can maintain your privacy if it's possible you might believe some of the examples you listed. Certainly the state has to be sure you've never thought about those things. Privacy could thwart knowing.

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