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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

The data the French government wants is in cleartext on Telegram's servers, but is there an argument to be made that, at least ethically, communications should be protected regardless of encrypted vs plaintext, and police should just do regular detective work to catch criminals?

Edit: PDF for the arrest warrant so that it's in context for the comments:

https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...

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Sending warrants and subpoenas is regular detective work.

Not when it's to another country with its own laws.

Seeing stuff like in the past few decades has me viewing criminals and police more and more alike.

At least the criminals don't hide behind a facade of public service/good.

I don't really have good context on the issue but is there a reason you consider getting Telegram logs outside of "regular detective work". Intercepting communications (assuming they have a warrant, at least based on my understanding in the US) would seem to be very standard police work to me.

> Intercepting communications (assuming they have a warrant, at least based on my understanding in the US) would seem to be very standard police work to me

There is also a big difference between doing what e.g. Signal does, which is respond with everything they have, i.e. nothing, and (a) refusing to provide data you have or (b) blowing the warrant off.

> an argument to be made that, at least ethically, communications should be protected regardless of encrypted vs plaintext, and police should just do regular detective work to catch criminals?

France has fairly extreme data retention requirements [1].

[1] https://www.conseil-etat.fr/en/news/connection-data-the-coun...

No, I don't think so. If people are openly advertising to provide criminal services (which is super-easy to find on Telegram; eg there are channels where you can pay people to damage property or commit violence), is it realistic to expect police to ignore that just because it's digital?

It is (unfortunately) regular police work.....nowadays. Only criminals (and their defenders) complained about fingerprints being used as id, nowadays it's expected. Time moves on. I did set up telegram today...my contribution to the noise, as I'm a very firm believer in communications being very protected.

I do highly commend Snowdon for what he has done in the past, but his (though highly understandable) silence regarding Ukraine puts him on my shitlist. Very low down on it, but on it all the same.

If you personally could lead by example, and flee the US, seek asylum in Russia only to be not "silent regarding Ukraine", your name could be deleted from my moronic shitlist too.

> silence regarding Ukraine

Do you even understand that he is forced to stay in Russia, and would prefer not to have an accidental fall from a window?

Is he a Russian puppet or isn’t he? If he can’t speak on ukraine for fear of being killed by Putin then everything he says should be viewed through that same lens

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