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Comment by booleanbetrayal | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly convinced that the arrest of Pavel Durov on content-moderation related issues is actually an attempt by a NATO state at securing information about adversaries, as it's the most used messaging app by Russian forces in Ukraine. Apparently the Wagner Group had developed their own messaging client, ostensibly for this reason.

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> actually an attempt by a NATO state at securing information about adversaries

Or disrupt their communications and cause chaos in their command structure. If Russia had to actually build it's own app; the corruption in the Russia state would give as strong of a showing as it's broken tanks.

It wouldn't surprise me to learn it's the US trying to spy on Ukraine. We don't want to end the gravy train for the Military Industrial Complex with a surprise or cheaper victory, do we?

Exactly. If he's allowed to be free, but banned from leaving the country, FVEY SIGINT can throw their entire bag of tricks against his comms while working remotely. Maybe they can recover keys, infrastructure details, etc.

Dude is going to need to build his own SCIF, surrounded by proximity detectors and armed guards, offgrid power generation, fed by quantum-resistant encrypted fiber lines with splice detection alarms in a hurry.

Nothing but disdain for FVEY, but this is a solid approach on their part.

> it's the most used messaging app by Russian forces in Ukraine

Group chats aren’t encrypted so that would be pretty idiotic if true.

They are encrypted in transit, just not end-to-end encrypted.

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