I feel that discord the company probably let's it slide because:
1. Moderation at scale is incredibly difficult. 2. They work with law enforcement agencies to execute warrants and subpoenas.
I'm also pretty sure phone number are required for sign up
I think your second point is the more likely explanation. Any other platform that would've hosted this many communities dedicated to drugs, cybercrime, etc would definitely have faced serious legal challenges. It seems much more likely that feds find it a useful platform to keep around
For Telegram though there isn't really a way around it, a phone is required. There is/was a way to buy some TON crypto token instead to avoid this verification but it became prohibitively too expensive.
Just something as simple as using a cookie or local storage can leave permanent traces behind so all the access can be easily correllated.
I'm not even sure if serious infosec measures exist to stop this, and if they do, someone is bound to slip up and they need to do it just once, and expose the whole chatroom.
I'm not a hacker but this sounds like failing Opsec 101, and people getting by just with sheer luck.
How do these two things correlate? I thought the benefit of E2E encryption is the fact that no one can decrypt your messages except for the participants in the conversation. There’s no keys anywhere on a server that an admin could use to decrypt the conversation. How would being behind a VPN negate that? The VPN still has to go through Discord servers where a key is presumably stored if the information is encrypted at all.