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Comment by SiempreViernes | Hacker News Reader

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

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