'Terrorgram' Chatrooms Are Fueling a Wave of Power Grid Attacks | Hacker News Reader

'Terrorgram' Chatrooms Are Fueling a Wave of Power Grid Attacks

bloomberg.com

15 pointsworstspotgain10 comments

The timing of this aligning with Pavel Durov's arrest makes it seem like propaganda. There doesn't seem to be anything new, most of it happened prior to 2024.

It's certainly an article in context. It explicitly mentions the arrest. It's not portraying itself as being "in a vacuum" or independent of it.

The UK Gov proscribed 'Terrorgram' in April this year. [0]

The first discussion I have found of it is Hope Not Hate's "State of Hate 2020" report. It hasn't been mentioned in the more recent reports. [1]

[0] - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/terrorgram-collective-now...

[1] - https://hopenothate.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/state-...

https://archive.is/PwzqA

The ex-post-facto beating-of-drums for something the state is already in motion on is far scarier and more sinister to me than convincing. The Fear Uncertainty and Doubt feels ultra-manufactured, given the timeline.

I'd argue the opposite. Putin is systematically bombing out the Ukrainian power grid. Meanwhile, his "extremist" minions are plotting and practicing taking out the US power grid, coordinating on a digital platform that seems to be under his grip.

That's far scarier and more sinister than some French investigation that nothing might come out of.

You sound like part of the manufactured noise he's talking about to be perfectly honest.

So, the absence of this 'noise' corresponds to a state where the power grid attacks are continuing without much attention being paid to them? In other words, in Putin-world or Putin-logic, the attacks and the coordination on the platform are not the problem, the rousing of attention to them is?

The thing is, you haven't made the faintest attempt to talk to the submission here. To everyone here it looks like you are just trollishly manufacturing some misinformation about some unrelated point unrelated to France suddenly arresting a dude & throwing a wide array of pretty novel & stunning "non-declared uses of crypotgraphy" accusations at him.

As others on social media have said, this feels sort of like the states gearing up for a general cryptography fight. It could be anything though! At first it seemed extremely unclear what France was upset over, but now that we have some initial accusations and they are quite broad, sweeping, and unclear, such that people witholding judgement are declaring a bit more nervousness (Mike Masnick for one). Does this become the first move to demand access total information awareness, state access to all systems? And picking on the weak shitty barely cryptographic at all weakling, to get some easy early wins on: theres a cowardly and terrifying logic to that.

And it feels like Bloomberg here is signing up to help justify & build the casus belli, pad the explanation. They haven't done any reporting on this till now, so it's hard to see this as good faith. Even as simply being slow & behind & inept at reporting, it feels hardly credible.

This has nothing to do with encryption. If Putin's teenage recruit-a-troops had used encryption to plan their terrorism Bloomberg wouldn't know about it. Nor is anyone outside France aware of or invested in what's going to happen in a French court.

Telegram is the enemy's platform. You can use it (and Kaspersky and whatnot) in Moscow all you want. The days of using it in the US to plan attacks against the power grid have to come to an end.

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