8 ms·

I would guess this means the gov't now has access to Telegram messages, one way or another.

golergka 6y ago
There's quite popular conspiracy theory in Russia that says that Telegram was FSB-backed project from the start, and the whole failed ban was implemented to promote it. However, there's still no concrete proof that government has backdoor access to it, so if they do, they're being very careful about it.
- duxup 6y ago
  >However, there's still no concrete proof that government has backdoor access to it, so if they do, they're being very careful about it. Sadly I feel like that is a very real possibility for any software / hardware produced in any significantly non free country. It can happen in other countries, but the likelihood of you hearing about it seems much much higher. It's a sad situation as I don't like the idea of being suspicious by default of other developers / products simply because their country of origin, but I have trouble avoiding the obvious fact that even a well meaning developer / company based in those countries would / could easily be pressured into introducing some sort of access (doesn't matter how) and it's simply unlikely we'd know.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    ... produced in any country. I wonder if the money Crypto AG made will have been worth any future reputation cost for Zug's economy. https://www.luzernerzeitung.ch/wirtschaft/bund-stoppt-nachfolgefirma-der-zuger-crypto-ag-ld.1202213 https://www.luzernerzeitung.ch/wirtschaft/bund-stoppt-nachfo... "... verkaufte die Crypto AG im Auftrag des US-Geheimdienstes CIA und des deutschen Bundesnachrichtendienstes Jahrzehnte lang manipulierte Chiffriergeräte an diverse Staaten."
    - duxup 6y ago
      Like I said it can happen anywhere, but the likelihood and ease of it happening in less free countries seems significantly different. I don't believe any country means all countries are equivalent as far as the risks go. The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations.
      - luckylion 6y ago
        > Like I said it can happen anywhere, but the likelihood and ease of it happening in less free countries seems significantly different. Why? Bureaucracy, Intelligence Services and state-level paranoia transcends political ideologies and systems. > The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations. On the other hand, we'd hear a lot more about anything from Moscow in our media, so I doubt there's a lot to be talked about as of now. It's only one big leak away, of course, but so far, I don't see a lot of support for your theory.
        duxup 6y ago
        Because in free countries there's a actually the potential for individuals and groups to refuse to cooperate and make the request known. If China comes to you and tells you to hand over the keys, you don't go to court or the news media ... in the west you can actually refuse and we see that happen and play out in the courts and etc.
        luckylion 6y ago
        Yeah, you have the theoretical potential to not comply with a national security letter and just go public. Good luck with that.
        duxup 6y ago
        In free countries there are court cases about such things. Not in less free countries. It seems like you're holding all nations to be equal if there isn't perfection. I think that's a poor way to measure anything involving people. The Snowden of China doesn't get his day in court, maybe never talked if his family back home was at risk.
  - freeflight 6y ago
    Most developed countries have access like that already baked in by law [0], some countries even go as far as denying any reasonable expectation of privacy for data you share with third-parties [1] so the data-Kraken of intelligence services can just slurp it all up in bulk [2]. In that context, in a post-Snowden world, it's kinda grating to still have people talk about all the evil things that supposedly happen in "non free countries", while mostly being completely unaware about what their own, supposedly "free", countries are doing, often on a global scale because they are supposedly way more likely to "hear" about it, while still not being able to change anything about it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine [2] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html
    - duxup 6y ago
      I'm not really concerned about what people are or aren't aware of. It's fairly obvious that more free countries allow for a greater chance in changes of law than non free countries. The Snowden of China would not get his day in court....
      - freeflight 6y ago
        > The Snowden of China would not get his day in court.... Because the Snowden of the US did?
        duxup 6y ago
        Isn't that up to Snowden? I don't think the Snowden of China gets such an option.
        freeflight 6y ago
        It's only up to Snowden because he managed to successfully evade getting captured, even tho the US went trough quite some lengths [0] trying to capture him and already had a plane ready to rendition him back to the US [1]. If they caught him, he would not have been able to properly defend himself because US law would prohibit him from making his case [2]. Heck, if they would have caught him before his Hong Kong meeting, they could simply have "vanished" him and nobody would have been any the wiser, as Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill would have had a very difficult time proving the legitimacy of the leaked documents. So no, neither the Snowden of the US, nor of China gets any of these options, that's why this whole false dichotomy of "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war. The best chance whistleblowers like that have is trying to escape the sphere of influence of whoever they blew the whistle on. For Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and others that's large parts of the world they will be welcomed in, for US whistleblowers it's pretty much only a handful of countries out of whom only a very few are actually able to keep them save/not straight up hand them over. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/05/edward-snowden-us-government-jet-wait-copenhagen-denmark https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/05/edward-snowd... [2] https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/wsj-op-ed-why-edward-snowden-wouldnt-get-a-fair-trial/ https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/wsj-op-ed-why-edward-s...
- baybal2 6y ago
  The most obvious fact is that Mr. Durov is not walking with a hole in his head, as a double digit portion of anybody who had balls to be audacious about their opposition, and is not known to have an extensive security detail. The mob has sent hitment to people whose offences were way lesser than that. Their ways are unyielding, and uncompromising. Putin has a record killing people who grieved him more than a decade ago, keeping trying for years on end. People he killed some times survived 2-3, even 4, assassination attempts over years, just to be eventually killed by yet another one. Knowing that, it's hard to explain how Telegram kept maintaining an office in Russia.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    > Knowing that, it's hard to explain how Telegram kept maintaining an office in Russia. Telegram has an office in Russia? Do you have sources? I cannot find one to confirm, and as far as I know that's not the case.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      In Russian https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-41310615 https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-41310615
      - fuoqi 6y ago
        Have you even read this article? Because it contains dubios allegations from a single person and an explicit denial from Durov.
      - thesz 6y ago
        I took a time and read it and also read much more. It is a good example of "he said she said". But Igor Ashmanov considers Rosenberg a good source on Durov brothers and lets say information above is correct. That means that Durov is used a part of the real estate he had access to to help development of Telegram. It does not mean that Durov is (not) affiliated with Russian government it just means that for Durov it is useful to use Russian real estate he knows and adores and to use Russian talent. It looks like Telegram servers are somewhere in Europe, BTW.
charlangas 6y ago
Agreed! I read the headline and my first thought was "Guess it's time to stop using Telegram now"
- buran77 6y ago
  Implausible undeniability, a brilliant way to plant the seeds of uncertainty. For the people who have enough reasons to be concerned about intercepted communications, the ones who were the core reason for the blocking (like activists) this can't sit well.
  - thesz 6y ago
    Are you sure these reasons for blocking were activists and not something more nefarious?
    - buran77 6y ago
      Of course I'm not sure. But activists are usually a safe bet in such cases. Whoever the reason for the ban they're probably having some doubts right now.
  - Avamander 6y ago
    > Implausible undeniability, a brilliant way to plant the seeds of uncertainty All that while having open-source and much safer alternatives. I don't see a problem here.
mattigames 6y ago
Someone should run a service where they have a chatbot pretend to be a terrorist on every chat app on every country and if the police reacts it means messages are being intercepted, like a status page of how much communication is being tracked.
- miked85 6y ago
  I am pretty sure the excuse that "I was just pretending" wouldn't go over too well with authorities.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    Assuming the chatbot operator can be identified. What if the whole thing is done pseudonymously/anonymously?
    - ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
      Hypothetically speaking, would you be willing to attempt to set it up?
      - Nextgrid 6y ago
        If someone were to do it, wouldn't it defeat the whole purpose of the system by answering "yes" to this question and letting the backdoor users know that someone is now laying traps to catch them using those backdoors in the act? However, the effort of setting this up could be better spent on making (or contributing to) a messaging app that's open-source and secure by design, where you don't need such setups to detect backdoors because they are near-impossible to introduce (open-source code and lack of a central server).
        mattigames 6y ago
        And the most likely thing to happen is that after you have spend years creating it nobody would use it.
        6y ago
fuoqi 6y ago
IIRC Telegram always was willing to share with security services message history from non-secret chats and groups. The problem was the idiotic requirement to give keys for E2EE chats.
- insensible 6y ago
  I read the court case in translation at the time. The opposite is true. The government acknowledged in court that keys for E2EE chats were not possible to surrender, but they had terrorists using non-E2EE groups to coordinate an attack and Telegram didn't produce those keys either.
  - fuoqi 6y ago
    Can you link it? The relevant law written in a really stupid manner, it requires to give keys for decrypting communications, which in case of TLS means session keys. Of course no sane company would log them, so they have nothing to give in the first place. But refusing to share keys speaks nothing about sharing messages themselves. One justification for sharing keys could be that security services want to use data recorded by SORM (and nowadays we also have the goddamn Yarovaya law) as an evidence and to do that you have decrypt it. Luckily for us modern security frameworks are built around ephemeral keys and forward secrecy.
- eitland 6y ago
  Telegram say they have gone pretty far to make sure they cannot get hold of private messages - even the ones who aren't E2E-encrypted. How? As far as I understand by having the client download encrypted messages from one Telegram server and keys from another and then place those servers in different datacenters in different jurisdictions. FTR: of course I am aware that unlike E2E-encrypted messaging in this case you have to trust the vendor. If you do is up to you. I trust them more than WhatsApp (who are E2E-encrypted but backup to NSA^HGoogle and try to extract all kinds of metadata) and less than Signal (even though Signal has had at least one horribly security glitch). One more thing: Telegram are also pretty open on the fact that they take down public terrorist content.
AlfeG 6y ago
This ban is useless. Telegram keep working without issues. I haven't hear about any issues about connecting to Telegram servers in RF. Some govn't entites are using Telegram, some high profile people from Ministry using Telegram.
lxglv 6y ago
Or it may mean, that they decided to stop budgeting effort that led to almost zero result. RossTelekomNadzor was banning IP-ranges from the main cloud providers, that resulted in major outages of other services (that were not multi-clod) except Telegram. People, who used Telegram did not stop using it since the very first day of official ban.
- maqp 6y ago
  The Russian state knew the ban wasn't effective, they just wanted to save face for being humiliated wrt Telegram not handing private TLS keys. They never needed those keys however, they've always had the capability to hack the server.
maqp 6y ago
They've always had that capability. 1. Hack the server 2. Read every dissident groups' messages. 3. No step 3.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Which is why dissident groups, at least those I know of, do not communicate sensitive info except by one-to-one secret chat.

There's quite popular conspiracy theory in Russia that says that Telegram was FSB-backed project from the start, and the whole failed ban was implemented to promote it. However, there's still no concrete proof that government has backdoor access to it, so if they do, they're being very careful about it.

duxup 6y ago
>However, there's still no concrete proof that government has backdoor access to it, so if they do, they're being very careful about it. Sadly I feel like that is a very real possibility for any software / hardware produced in any significantly non free country. It can happen in other countries, but the likelihood of you hearing about it seems much much higher. It's a sad situation as I don't like the idea of being suspicious by default of other developers / products simply because their country of origin, but I have trouble avoiding the obvious fact that even a well meaning developer / company based in those countries would / could easily be pressured into introducing some sort of access (doesn't matter how) and it's simply unlikely we'd know.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  ... produced in any country. I wonder if the money Crypto AG made will have been worth any future reputation cost for Zug's economy. https://www.luzernerzeitung.ch/wirtschaft/bund-stoppt-nachfolgefirma-der-zuger-crypto-ag-ld.1202213 https://www.luzernerzeitung.ch/wirtschaft/bund-stoppt-nachfo... "... verkaufte die Crypto AG im Auftrag des US-Geheimdienstes CIA und des deutschen Bundesnachrichtendienstes Jahrzehnte lang manipulierte Chiffriergeräte an diverse Staaten."
  - duxup 6y ago
    Like I said it can happen anywhere, but the likelihood and ease of it happening in less free countries seems significantly different. I don't believe any country means all countries are equivalent as far as the risks go. The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations.
    - luckylion 6y ago
      > Like I said it can happen anywhere, but the likelihood and ease of it happening in less free countries seems significantly different. Why? Bureaucracy, Intelligence Services and state-level paranoia transcends political ideologies and systems. > The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations. On the other hand, we'd hear a lot more about anything from Moscow in our media, so I doubt there's a lot to be talked about as of now. It's only one big leak away, of course, but so far, I don't see a lot of support for your theory.
      - duxup 6y ago
        Because in free countries there's a actually the potential for individuals and groups to refuse to cooperate and make the request known. If China comes to you and tells you to hand over the keys, you don't go to court or the news media ... in the west you can actually refuse and we see that happen and play out in the courts and etc.
        luckylion 6y ago
        Yeah, you have the theoretical potential to not comply with a national security letter and just go public. Good luck with that.
        duxup 6y ago
        In free countries there are court cases about such things. Not in less free countries. It seems like you're holding all nations to be equal if there isn't perfection. I think that's a poor way to measure anything involving people. The Snowden of China doesn't get his day in court, maybe never talked if his family back home was at risk.
- freeflight 6y ago
  Most developed countries have access like that already baked in by law [0], some countries even go as far as denying any reasonable expectation of privacy for data you share with third-parties [1] so the data-Kraken of intelligence services can just slurp it all up in bulk [2]. In that context, in a post-Snowden world, it's kinda grating to still have people talk about all the evil things that supposedly happen in "non free countries", while mostly being completely unaware about what their own, supposedly "free", countries are doing, often on a global scale because they are supposedly way more likely to "hear" about it, while still not being able to change anything about it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine [2] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/english.html
  - duxup 6y ago
    I'm not really concerned about what people are or aren't aware of. It's fairly obvious that more free countries allow for a greater chance in changes of law than non free countries. The Snowden of China would not get his day in court....
    - freeflight 6y ago
      > The Snowden of China would not get his day in court.... Because the Snowden of the US did?
      - duxup 6y ago
        Isn't that up to Snowden? I don't think the Snowden of China gets such an option.
        freeflight 6y ago
        It's only up to Snowden because he managed to successfully evade getting captured, even tho the US went trough quite some lengths [0] trying to capture him and already had a plane ready to rendition him back to the US [1]. If they caught him, he would not have been able to properly defend himself because US law would prohibit him from making his case [2]. Heck, if they would have caught him before his Hong Kong meeting, they could simply have "vanished" him and nobody would have been any the wiser, as Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill would have had a very difficult time proving the legitimacy of the leaked documents. So no, neither the Snowden of the US, nor of China gets any of these options, that's why this whole false dichotomy of "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war. The best chance whistleblowers like that have is trying to escape the sphere of influence of whoever they blew the whistle on. For Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and others that's large parts of the world they will be welcomed in, for US whistleblowers it's pretty much only a handful of countries out of whom only a very few are actually able to keep them save/not straight up hand them over. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/05/edward-snowden-us-government-jet-wait-copenhagen-denmark https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/05/edward-snowd... [2] https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/wsj-op-ed-why-edward-snowden-wouldnt-get-a-fair-trial/ https://whistleblower.org/in-the-news/wsj-op-ed-why-edward-s...
baybal2 6y ago
The most obvious fact is that Mr. Durov is not walking with a hole in his head, as a double digit portion of anybody who had balls to be audacious about their opposition, and is not known to have an extensive security detail. The mob has sent hitment to people whose offences were way lesser than that. Their ways are unyielding, and uncompromising. Putin has a record killing people who grieved him more than a decade ago, keeping trying for years on end. People he killed some times survived 2-3, even 4, assassination attempts over years, just to be eventually killed by yet another one. Knowing that, it's hard to explain how Telegram kept maintaining an office in Russia.
- dgellow 6y ago
  > Knowing that, it's hard to explain how Telegram kept maintaining an office in Russia. Telegram has an office in Russia? Do you have sources? I cannot find one to confirm, and as far as I know that's not the case.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    In Russian https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-41310615 https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-41310615
    - fuoqi 6y ago
      Have you even read this article? Because it contains dubios allegations from a single person and an explicit denial from Durov.
    - thesz 6y ago
      I took a time and read it and also read much more. It is a good example of "he said she said". But Igor Ashmanov considers Rosenberg a good source on Durov brothers and lets say information above is correct. That means that Durov is used a part of the real estate he had access to to help development of Telegram. It does not mean that Durov is (not) affiliated with Russian government it just means that for Durov it is useful to use Russian real estate he knows and adores and to use Russian talent. It looks like Telegram servers are somewhere in Europe, BTW.

charlangas 6y ago

Agreed! I read the headline and my first thought was "Guess it's time to stop using Telegram now"

buran77 6y ago
Implausible undeniability, a brilliant way to plant the seeds of uncertainty. For the people who have enough reasons to be concerned about intercepted communications, the ones who were the core reason for the blocking (like activists) this can't sit well.
- thesz 6y ago
  Are you sure these reasons for blocking were activists and not something more nefarious?
  - buran77 6y ago
    Of course I'm not sure. But activists are usually a safe bet in such cases. Whoever the reason for the ban they're probably having some doubts right now.
- Avamander 6y ago
  > Implausible undeniability, a brilliant way to plant the seeds of uncertainty All that while having open-source and much safer alternatives. I don't see a problem here.

mattigames 6y ago

Someone should run a service where they have a chatbot pretend to be a terrorist on every chat app on every country and if the police reacts it means messages are being intercepted, like a status page of how much communication is being tracked.

miked85 6y ago
I am pretty sure the excuse that "I was just pretending" wouldn't go over too well with authorities.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  Assuming the chatbot operator can be identified. What if the whole thing is done pseudonymously/anonymously?
  - ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
    Hypothetically speaking, would you be willing to attempt to set it up?
    - Nextgrid 6y ago
      If someone were to do it, wouldn't it defeat the whole purpose of the system by answering "yes" to this question and letting the backdoor users know that someone is now laying traps to catch them using those backdoors in the act? However, the effort of setting this up could be better spent on making (or contributing to) a messaging app that's open-source and secure by design, where you don't need such setups to detect backdoors because they are near-impossible to introduce (open-source code and lack of a central server).
      - mattigames 6y ago
        And the most likely thing to happen is that after you have spend years creating it nobody would use it.
      - 6y ago

fuoqi 6y ago

IIRC Telegram always was willing to share with security services message history from non-secret chats and groups. The problem was the idiotic requirement to give keys for E2EE chats.

insensible 6y ago
I read the court case in translation at the time. The opposite is true. The government acknowledged in court that keys for E2EE chats were not possible to surrender, but they had terrorists using non-E2EE groups to coordinate an attack and Telegram didn't produce those keys either.
- fuoqi 6y ago
  Can you link it? The relevant law written in a really stupid manner, it requires to give keys for decrypting communications, which in case of TLS means session keys. Of course no sane company would log them, so they have nothing to give in the first place. But refusing to share keys speaks nothing about sharing messages themselves. One justification for sharing keys could be that security services want to use data recorded by SORM (and nowadays we also have the goddamn Yarovaya law) as an evidence and to do that you have decrypt it. Luckily for us modern security frameworks are built around ephemeral keys and forward secrecy.
eitland 6y ago
Telegram say they have gone pretty far to make sure they cannot get hold of private messages - even the ones who aren't E2E-encrypted. How? As far as I understand by having the client download encrypted messages from one Telegram server and keys from another and then place those servers in different datacenters in different jurisdictions. FTR: of course I am aware that unlike E2E-encrypted messaging in this case you have to trust the vendor. If you do is up to you. I trust them more than WhatsApp (who are E2E-encrypted but backup to NSA^HGoogle and try to extract all kinds of metadata) and less than Signal (even though Signal has had at least one horribly security glitch). One more thing: Telegram are also pretty open on the fact that they take down public terrorist content.

AlfeG 6y ago

This ban is useless. Telegram keep working without issues. I haven't hear about any issues about connecting to Telegram servers in RF. Some govn't entites are using Telegram, some high profile people from Ministry using Telegram.

lxglv 6y ago

Or it may mean, that they decided to stop budgeting effort that led to almost zero result. RossTelekomNadzor was banning IP-ranges from the main cloud providers, that resulted in major outages of other services (that were not multi-clod) except Telegram. People, who used Telegram did not stop using it since the very first day of official ban.

maqp 6y ago
The Russian state knew the ban wasn't effective, they just wanted to save face for being humiliated wrt Telegram not handing private TLS keys. They never needed those keys however, they've always had the capability to hack the server.

maqp 6y ago

They've always had that capability. 1. Hack the server 2. Read every dissident groups' messages. 3. No step 3.

sudosysgen 6y ago
Which is why dissident groups, at least those I know of, do not communicate sensitive info except by one-to-one secret chat.