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Comment by eitland | Hacker News Reader

No, not as far as I have seen.

It seems they only describe that Telegram has been used extensively by criminals for the same reasons everyone else use it:

Great ux, reasonable privacy (for what we needed).

Note: all that is in a flux now. Personally I trust Telegram less now as it seems the same exceptions the French has made for themselves can also be used by russia or any other terrorist regime.

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The assumption has been that Telegram provided significantly more access to Russia years ago, as it remains unblocked (with channels even run by the government), and Pavel Durov wasn't arrested when he visited Russia after laws were passed that would apply to Telegram but he claims they were refusing to follow.

That is a good argument.

I have however thought that the actual reason was because Russia depends on it.

They seriously even use it to coordinate artillery strikes although lately I have seen evidence they now sometimes use Discord.

I am not sure, and being convinced that Pavel Durov has actually visited Russia several times the last few years make me question my assumptions.

However I still see Russian opposition being more scared now after Pavels visit to France because now the terms of service has been updated to tell us that they will ahare our ip address and phone number with law enforcement if they feel compelled to or something to that effect.

What criteria do you use when calling regime a terrorist regime?

Targeting civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, places of worship, water supplies, food supply lines, etc for the purposes of instilling fear in a civilian population to push a particular stance.

To clarify, is it still a terrorist regime when it's not actually targeting civilians, but only by coincidence civilians and civilian infrastructure are close to the regime's military targets?

Traditionally, no. Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians

When the targets, as a matter of publicly stated policy, engage in war crimes of using human shields to both attack civilians and defend themselves, store war munitions and setup command centers in hospitals, schools, etc., and when the country defends itself against those war crimes adhering to legal proportionality rules, then no.

If it is actual indiscriminate bombing or targeting of civilian targets not used in war crimes, human shields, storing military equipment & munitions, command& control, etc., then yes.

What's the point of using human shields if your enemy isn't averse to killing the shields at all?

Bad publicity against your enemy; it's literally the stated policy of Hamas to make more Palestinian "martyrs". It gets others to scream "genocide", causrs more global division, etc. And, in fact, they are averse to killing the human shields, just not absolutely averse (and definitely less averse after you go on murder, raoe, & kidnapping sprees at music festivals, etc).

So if the enemy acts exactly like them, they suddenly get even worse morals? What happened to "turnabout is fair play"?

No.

This is rather clearly described in the laws of war.

If militants hides behind civilians or use civilians as shields for military infrastructure, the lives of the civilians is their responsibility.

This might seem counterintuitive at first but is perfectly obvious once you stop and think:

If it was legal to use civilians as human shields and it would shield your military infrastructure everyone would do it.

Because the laws of the war is so clear about it nobody does it except Hamas and they only do it because they know western media and commentators will blame Israel despite international laws being very very clear in this matter.

> Because the laws of the war is so clear about it nobody does it except Hamas

Everyone does it. We just call it espionage. That said, when a Western espionage mission goes awry and it results in collateral damage, the government doing the fuckery is properly blamed.

Not sure if we are talking about the same thing?

I'm talking about Hamas literally

a) putting missile ramps and ammo depots in busy areas

b) preventing civilians from leaving after Israel has dropped leaflets, called phones in the area and dropped noise bombs

I don't see how the west does anything similar.

Sure, Hamas dials the tactic to eleven. Point is hiding merchant raiders [1] and clandestine activities (e.g. the CIA's fake vaccine campaign to verify Bin Laden [2]) operate on the same principle. And when those go wrong, we properly blame the people using civilians for cover.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchant_raider

[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-cia-fake-vacc...

Why does Israel target civilian targets that have nothing to do with Hamas?

Because the war is only partially about engaging with Hamas. It is also about cementing is stranglehold on the West Bank, and in creating conditions in Gaza favorable to what its current regime coldly refers to as "voluntary transfer":

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and...

> Telegram’s encryption and anonymity provide a readymade technological platform for illicit activity, helping people to overcome information barriers and gaps in the circulation of information

That sentence is definitely in the "services like Telegram should not exist" camp. I wouldn't call the entire article a "hit piece" but the author is definitely trying to sway minds in favor of more government crackdowns on apps like Telegram.

I am not conversant in this field, but this portion of the author's profile made me think that she favors the money launderers on some libertarian grounds:

> Her dissertation explores how the illicit market intersects and coexists with Cambodia’s political and economic systems in the cybercrime sector, breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence and intersecting with transnational business networks to form a global illicit network.

"Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence" would seem a good thing only if you think that distributing violence more widely should be a social goal.

> "Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence" would seem a good thing only if you think that distributing violence more widely should be a social goal.

I think that a reasonable and useful distinction can be made between

   "Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence"

and

   distributing violence more widely should be a social goal.

The first would be every ideological 2nd amendment supporter (as opposed to criminal, practical, contrarian or stick-it-to-the-libs 2nd amendment supporters).

The second would be criminals.

Here is a fuller expansion of the thinking behind my sentence you quote.

The usual construction is:

- in order to have a peaceful and ordered society, citizens renounce the use of violence and interact only by peaceful means

- citizens of a city/region/country delegate the use of violence to the government (the "sovereign state")

- the government's use of violence is carefully circumscribed by laws and use of governmental laws outside these circumstances is forbidden

Which ends up defining government as the agent with the exclusive authority to use violence in a geographic region. And by extension has a monopoly on the use of violence, for the safety and freedom of all concerned.

"Breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence", in this interpretation, would be to say that some or all people have recourse to violence, and in the worst case are not restrained by law or government. It's in this sense that I think that "breaking the sovereign state’s monopoly on violence" amounts to distributing access to violence more widely.

The consistent application of these ideas would require that citizens not have the right to resist government application of force. In my view, the second amendment is not a carve-out of (i.e. an exception to) this doctrine if it is understood to be applicable to resisting force applied by other citizens, not by government.

Edit: just saw this now, and I think I understand what you mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41672534

Sorry, English is not my first language :-)

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To try to explain were I come from in this discussion:

I live in one of the Nordic countries in the suburbs.

From what I know two of my immediate neighbors have firearms. I suspect there are a lot more nearby because gun ownership is very common and most people don't talk about it - I only know they have guns because they sometimes go hunting.)

Growing up I knew about three houses with complete, working assault rifles and emergency depots of ammo. (This was completely normal until a spectacular robbery were the robbers used stolen assault rifles early in the 2000s.)

Switzerland and Austria I understand is the same.

All three known as very peaceful countries.

From what I read most of the absolute worst crimes against humanity has happened by the government against the citizens, not by citizens against citizens.

I am aware of the risks of pervasive weapons ownership but I think of it as an insurance policy against much much worse problems.

So I feel quite confident that there is a huge difference between having access to violence and using violence.

> first would be every ideological 2nd amendment supporter

Owning a gun doesn't break the government's monopoly on violence because owning a gun isn't violent. Firing a gun at a shooting range isn't violent. (Most people don't consider hunting violence.)

Reasonable 2nd Amendment supporters grant the state its monopoly on violence. They just want the means by way to revoke it. (Or, more realistically, make its abuse more difficult.)

I would argue that the government's monopoly on violence is more about its power to engage in violence than literal acts of violence.

Ahh. Good point.

Around here people are often very well armed but only military and politice are allowed to use firearms.

> the government's monopoly on violence is more about its power to engage in violence than literal acts of violence

Power being capability and willingness. Guns give a private citizen capability, same as anyone who can make a fist. They do not extend to signalling a willingness to shoot someone. (Threats, on the other hand, are illegal. Partly because they're no fun for anyone involved. Partly because that crosses from potential to actual.)

My understanding is that groups in Telegram are not encrypted and the document mostly refers to groups. When it comes to e2e encryption of one-to-one chats Telegram is not unique in that space.

Telegram encryption is opt in, even for one on one chats. That's unlike What's App, Facebook Messenger (as of 2024-03), Signal

Telegram encryption is not opt in. End-to-end encryption however is.

Also this always get mentioned and everyone confuses encryption and end-to-end encryption.

What seems to never get mentioned here unless I do is that there is more to security than end-to-end encryption or not:

WhatsApp would (will? I don't use it since years ago) happily upload your data unencrypted (actually unencrypted not not-end-to-end-encryted!) to the biggest data harvester of all -Google if you or anyone you chat with enabled cloud backups.

Signal had months I think where they had a weird bug were tje client would send pictures to people without the user triggering it.

Facebook Messenger besides leaking all your communication patterns to the second largest data harvester also have this nifty feature were if someone reports your message an unencrypted message goes to Facebook.

Facebook was also the ones that suggested people uploaded nudes so the could "know what they should remove", wasn't it?

Signal also had a nasty exploit that would let anyone who sent a specially crafted message take control over the signal users computer if they opened the message in the desktop client.

Telegram is also the only one that I am aware of that has reproducible builds for both Android and IOS. For every other client you have to trust them. With Telegram you can (could at least last I checked) check out the source, build it and compare it to the version on the App Store.

What I mean is not that one should trust Telegram (there are things I use Signal for), only that when it comes to security engineering there is a lot more to consider than end-to-end encryption and HN really struggles to see this.

seems like meta and google jump thru a lot of hoops to maintain the sharade of e2e-privacy whereas with telegram you know upfront that everything goes to someone else's computer and call it a day

I agree.

Signal I think is very good with the two major exceptions:

- AFAIK they don't publish reproducible builds

- They've (IIRC and AFAIK) at times had lower quality when it came to the non cryptographic parts.

So if someones lives depend on e2e-encryption Signal is the only recommended messenger IMO.

For following public news channels from Ukraine and the Middle East there is no alternative to Telegram.

And if I have to organize something and not everyone is ready to install Signal (i.e. all the time around here) I try to use Telegram. That way I'm at least not spoonfeeding Google and Meta at the same time.

If FSB sits on my weekend plans that is annoying but no big deal.

(I was however rather annoyed when I realized local police used Telegram a while ago. I think that was very irresponsible.)

Signal has been audited. Has Telegram?

Signal says it's had reproducible builds since 2016: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/tree/main/reprod...

Signal has reproducible builds on Android. If they have on IOS like Telegram then I have missed it.

I realize now that while I wrote reproducible builds on both Android and iOS further up the thread I forgot to in my last reply. It was an honest mistake, I forgot.

Telegram is open source.

And has reproducible builds.

So anyone can audit it and verify that

a) end-to-end encryption either works or does not (but I guess someone had told us if it was broken)

b) it is not enabled by default

c) in the default mode data is sent encrypted to Telegrams data centers, after that you have to trust Telegram not to snoop in it.

Does not mean it is perfect or even good, but for its use cases it is a lot better than HN gives it credit for.

It's not even considered a good implementation. It's opt-in instead of by default and uses non-standard cryptographic techniques.

People who are critical of encrypted apps like to use Telegram as the chief boogyman but the real reason that Telegram is preferred by criminals isn't the encryption, it's that Telegram has a history of not moderating at all, allowing huge private groups, and refusing any cooperation with law enforcement or CSAM reporting groups.

Better for a central source to not have the data, like Signal, than to refuse to cooperate. Now Telegram can be compelled to disclose what they do have.

The author is a Taiwanese university student studying anthropology. Not everything is a submarine (planted PR).

> Note: all that is in a flux now. Personally I trust Telegram less now as it seems the same exceptions the French has made for themselves can also be used by russia or any other terrorist regime.

What made you believe that Russia hasn't had a firehose into Telegram's backend for the longest time?

For one the fact that Ukraine used it for a long time and Russia even back before Ukraine told people to shun Telegram for work didn't seem to have very good intelligence.

Also because I see over time how hopelessly incompetent Russian authorities are.

Also (but this is more shaky, I never verified) because supposedly a good number of Telegram employees are Ukrainian.

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