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Comment by 0x1ch | Hacker News Reader

Didn't France intercept Telegram's CEO to force him to backdoor the app while in country?

Yes. Yes they did.

They didn't. TG has never defaulted to e2ee and TG refused to provide the non-e2ee data they had. That is refusing to comply with the law.

You guys hurt your argument so much by straight up lying so you can feel self righteous anger over it

Being arrested as you walk off your flight sure seems like unjust prosecution.They had him for charges all the way up to being complicit in CSAM distribution. They wanted to hang him, or get what they wanted...

It's very normal. You get arrested anywhere they physically can, and then you go through a trial, which may be in a real court or a kangaroo one.

What? Why should criminals be protected specifically when they are walking of their flight?

Durov runs an app where slave trade was known and documented, and did nothing.

If your answer to slave trade using encryption is "deny encryption to everyone" we'll have to agree to disagree.

Funny how you translated "comply with takedown request" into "deny encryption to everyone".

Doubly funny as you seem to be implying Telegram has worthwhile encryption to start with.

I don't understand the last line in your comment: if Telegram doesn't have good encryption, why would anyone require to have a backdoor installed? Are you implying that the French government isn't able to decrypt a bad encryption scheme? Or that the idea that this government asked for a backdoor is preposterous?

Encryption doesn't have to be backdoord because none of the group chats on telegram are encrypted (telegram gets to claim it's "encrypted" because it's TLS between client and server, but e2ee is not claimed except for inconvenient device-to-device chat.

In any case, the back door may be more of a Room 641A arrangement where all messages are intercepted by the host government, saving them the trouble of installing sockpuppet accounts in all the chatrooms they want to keep an eye on

The cynic in me believes that the motivation behind this very publicized melodramatic arrest is even simpler: reinforce the myth that Telegram is e2ee (remember the 90s when the DoJ wanted us to believe that 40bits keys were unbreakable?)

It's possible that at some point in the past they used TLS, but I believe that MTProto(0) is used now for any communication through Telegram.

(0): https://core.telegram.org/mtproto

O no you're right, I was going off the fact that it's just an encrypted tunnel from client to server, doesn't hide any message content from service provider the way people might expect when they hear "encrypted"

Yes, they were only not taken down because french LE did not properly follow the legal process (which was set by the EU btw), and didn't send their requests to the correct email. Of course Telegram is ignoring informal requests.

https://t.me/durov/342

https://t.me/durov/447

Telegram is not encrypted. These channels where not.

At who do you stop laying personal blame for how people use their free will on the Internet,

between Durov and Sir Tim Berners-Lee?

Can you believe that the cash Euro is used in crime, human trafficking, and exploitatiom everywhere, and the US hasn't invaded Europe to stop them from supporting human rights violations all over the earth?

The 500 euro bill, it used to be the Canadian 1000 dollar bill.

And institutions who handle cash are required to turn over their records to investigate such crimes. So are chat apps. Telegram refused.

So why doesn't the EU hand over its secrets to the US? Seems like the EU is a dangerous supporter of terrorism and human trafficking that should be dissolved

This has nothing to do with encryption or GrapheneOS. Durov was letting slave networks on unencrypted channels go free.

Same with the Europeans, do you know how much tax evasion and embezzlement goes through Ireland alone?

People claim enormous sums. But it seems terribly odd to me. One company that's mentioned often has enough employees in Dublin to fill four office buildings. That certainly sounds like a real business to me, not a tax dodge.

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