Telegram as an Independent Intelligence Agency | Hacker News Reader

Telegram as an Independent Intelligence Agency

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34 pointsapi14 comments

This seems to be a rehashing of the WSJ article on the connection between Telegram and spies, which is much better:

https://www.wsj.com/world/who-is-pavel-durov-telegram-founde...

Thanks for sharing the link. The WSJ story is indeed more informative.

Fun fact: Recently FSB database on border crossings from 2014 to 2023 was leaked online and Durov visited Russia 50 times since 2015. In fact, he was in Russia the day the telegram was unblocked. I wonder why?

Care to link to the leaks?

I've heard similar stories on and off but if you post the link you'd be the first to let me know the source.

Not saying it isn't true. Only pointing out I have not seen the source yet.

Rumors are that it costs 270000 USD, but apparently a couple of aggregators have bought it.

Here is a Russian source (Use google translate): https://storage.googleapis.com/istories/news/2024/08/27/pave...

The DB was sold on darknet for huge money (200 000$+).

First person to report about this leak was this guy: https://t.me/zakharovchannel/1416?single

Multiple people so far have confirmed it's a real DB.

The database itself doesn’t seem to be publically available (yet, I guess). Original reporting (in Russian):

The announcement of the leak (by Zakharov[1]) was in https://t.me/zakharovchannel/1418.

Alburov[2], former head investigative journalist at Navalny’s ACF[3], confirmed(/bragged) that the the data matched their publications in https://x.com/alburov/status/1828143239615947234.

The source for most of the news articles on Durov specifically, published in iStories[4], is https://istories.media/news/2024/08/27/pavel-durov-priezzhal....

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Zakharov_(journalist)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgy_Alburov

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Corruption_Foundation

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IStories

I would happily switch to an alternative if they were good alternatives.

The user experience on Telegram is amazing, the responsiveness, messages arrive instantly on all devices, the apps are feature rich and just work

Nothing can compete to how good it is

I'm perhaps lucky in that I don't need the security and privacy of a service like Signal

Signal works just fine, but Signal Desktop doesn't bring over old messages, since they're not stored in the cloud.

Given the number of data breaches the world experiences, I don't want every message thread I'm in available in plaintext on some company's servers. Just imagine an AI processing every conversation you've ever had.

I could imagine easy msg duplication over multiple devices to be a operational vulnerability. But honestly: most people don't need to worry about opsec. And it is very annoying that signal can't allow multidevice and data duplication, even Whatsapp solved that now

It would be nice if Signal supported that, and one day maybe it will, but it's not a dealbreaker for me. My linked devices have all the conversations I care about.

What I do care about is that I'm the only one that can read these messages and that they're a nonprofit funded by donations.

Hmm, some company has servers where communication is stored, therefore it's an intelligence agency?

I think the author is just widening the definition (of intelligence agency) here and/or speculating.

Interesting that the author highlights Telegram as associated with crypto bros and the far right. In my circles, Telegram is most known as used by whistleblowers and uncensored Ukraine war reporters. I suppose this is the obvious niche for "alternative" platforms - take anything that's banned or downranked on the mainstream platforms but for which there is still a substantial consumer demand.

It's heavily used by a ton of people in Ukraine, which is probably quite unwise given the strong circumstantial evidence for it being compromised by Russia.

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