10 ms·

say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker". It

say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker". It may not be the main use of telegram but if you are a member of the public only seeing these kind of stickers everywhere would make me worry as well.

iqanq 5y ago
I don't see the issue. People (should) have a right to meet other people with similar interests and organise.
- lima 5y ago
  Yes, but there's limits - like similar interests in extremism, calls to violence, assassination plots...
  - iqanq 5y ago
    Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do.
    - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
      We made the decision because the law is not a arbitrary thing it gets implemented because of what is written in our constitution and by law makers that we voted into place. If you want to change the law do it politically and get a majority like we did with cannabis and stop rambling about "freedoms" on the internet.
      - amadeuspagel 5y ago
        > stop rambling about "freedoms" To ramble about something means to talk about it in a confused way. If you find something specific confusing about the way the parent comment talks about "freedoms", maybe you should point that out. (Of course the parent comment doesn't talk about "freedoms" at all, confused or not.)
        YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
        > Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do. Not everybody in the world wants to be the one who decides what is extreme or mainstream. He fears to be silenced and ostracized or that his right to free speech will be suppressed. That all because there could be a possibility that a for-profit company gets forbidden that is not complying with the laws of the country it itself is operating in. This is rambling.
    - lima 5y ago
      It's a fine line, and it's why a functioning democracy and judicial system is so important in finding the right balance (and ensuring there's public oversight[2]). One of the most important values in German politics is the concept of "wehrhafte Demokratie"[1], essentially, the idea that Germany can't ever again let the democratic system be defeated by populists, even a majority. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany [2]: Personally, I'm not a fan of having underpaid teams of "content moderators" in charge of deciding what constitutes acceptable public discourse precisely because there's insufficient democratic oversight. It's also a horrible, psychologically taxing job. It's a hard problem that won't be solved by ignoring it.
  - larryflint 5y ago
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    And this is in Germany. They have seen extremism and calls to violence. I can't think of any nation with more of a right—even a duty—to manage its society and prevent society-level mass crimes.
    - Thiez 5y ago
      That's a strange thing to say. Are you suggesting that the German people are especially vulnerable to committing society-level mass crimes (compared to other nationalities) and thus have a duty (to who?) to be extra vigilant and tough on themselves?
  - orbifold 5y ago
    Arguably in a well run society those groups would have so little power / influence that they wouldn’t be limited by how well they are able to communicate privately. The student protests in the 70s and coocurring terror campaign was not happening in a vacuum but because former Nazis had been part of all aspects of post-war Germany and young people were not having it.
- lampe3 5y ago
  So its okay for people to leak addresses of politicians and call on other to kill them? They match your interests and they can organize. Oh wait I know you yourself know nothing about this situation. Oh wait you yourself never got death threats to your personal mail and home? Oh wait its not like the article is saying that closing it would be the last resort...
  - halfdan 5y ago
    Whataboutism isn't helping. Obviously the answer to your question is no, but you could do the same with snailmail.
    - lampe3 5y ago
      Not that easy, not that cheap, not that open and not on that scale. Which are all important points. And again Telegram is breaking german/eu law and they are ignoring it even if they get a letter.
  - iqanq 5y ago
    That argument is not honest. There already are laws against doxing and threats. We don't need to censor a whole platform because of that. Especially if it's done just so we can conveniently muzzle groups that just want to protest against masks, vaccines, or lockdowns.
    - lima 5y ago
      But that's the point - Telegram refuses to honor these laws. There are court rulings demanding Telegram to remove content, which Telegram ignores, hence the threats of banning the entire platform.
      - polski-g 5y ago
        Does telegram have employees in Germany? Why would the German government have control over any corporation on the planet?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sandworm101 5y ago
  Organize what? Hate? Violence? Countries have been invaded for allowing certain like-minded people to meet and organize things within thier boarders. Lets not pretend that all speech should be free. Every country on earth limits criminal activity, limits those wanting to organize violence or rampant illegality.
- pjc50 5y ago
  Organizing a crime in conjunction with other people is an offence in basically every jurisdiction, including the US.
  - Brian_K_White 5y ago
    But the mailman who carried the coordinating communications is not guilty of participating in that coordination, doesn't open and read the mail, and the postal service is not shut down when the activity is discovered. Perhaps some would say "Ah but it's possible to intercept and open someone's mail, and that's the difference!" Probably with a warrant an individual's mail can be intercepted, but if the letter inside were written in code, then tbats as far as that goes. It's not up to the postal service to break the code or prevent communication in code. It's impossible anyway since code doesn't have to look like code. In this case maybe Telegram is like if the postal service also wrote the code but really the code is more like the envelope. The a alogies get fuzzy of course. Is the envelope maybe really tcp/ip? or is that the road? Or is the road the fiberoptic cable? You have to go back to just examining the essential facts and implications: It has never been illegal to send a letter with envelopes that block light or expose tampering, and has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code. Anyone could write an impossible law, but it would still be impossible. Any communication at all no matter what it looks like, could be code. So there is no defensible/actionable way to have a problem with either a letter carrier, or the act of writing a letter in code. And those are the two things Telegram does or facilitates, and so do countless other services and channels.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      > has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code This is a very sweeping statement that is false for lots of places and times; while Germany is at the supportive end of encryption various other EU countries have mandatory key disclosure to law enforcement. Even in the US it's illegal to make encrypted radio transmissions on certain bands. It is a poor argument to make the it would be impossible for Germany to criminalize encrypted communication. They can do it, even if it would be ineffective and widely subverted.
- Arnt 5y ago
  Some right or every right? There's a difference between the right for you and a few others to set up a group when you already know each other, and the right for you to search for those others by interest. Technically: Private groups are different from groups that are publicly searchable by or or more of name/blurb/message content.
theshrike79 5y ago
What if I distributed stickers with a phone number where to call to get drugs? Would Germany ban phones? If I did it with an email address, would they ban email? :)
- lelandfe 5y ago
  Not a popular statement on HN, nor one I relish making, but both of those can usually be intercepted by the state and reviewed. So less ban and more investigate. I think we can all admit that end to end encrypted messaging is a thorny problem as far as police work is concerned.
- pjc50 5y ago
  In the phone case, they would obviously put out a wiretap order: https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Nachrichtendienste/Telekommunikationsueberwachung.html https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Nachrichtendiens...
bijant 5y ago
It's not like you need Telegram to buy Drugs in Hamburg. There are places like the U-Bahn Sternschanze or the Hafentreppe where Dealers have been continuously offering light and hard drugs for over a decade with an uptime that puts FAANG SLAs to shame. They occasionally get raided whenever the police wants to have their pictures in the local papers but it's not like there is anything you could get via Telegram that you couldn't get through a five minute walk. The only difference is that the Dealers protect their turf, so Telegram opens new avenues for competing dealers to enter the market.
- EGreg 5y ago
  I have seen this argument over and over but there is a power law and authorities just need to cut off the head off the probability distribution. Centralized messengers are no hydra.
  - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
    Just wait until German police discovers a thing called SMS. Right now, we are lucky that Fax is still a thing in Germany, and the whole internet thing is just a "Neuland" (new land), as ex-chancellor Merkel admitted.
    - EGreg 5y ago
      Oh yes, because local telecommunication companies delivering SMS using archaic, non-end-to-end encrypted protocols are TOTALLY more resilient to government censorship than Telegram :-P Look, when it comes to SMS and craigslist-style things etc. I bet they will want to just keep them up so they can act as a dragnet for the fools who use them to organize criminal activity.
      - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
        I'm not telling that SMS is secure. S stands for short, not secure. But given how easy it is to fake and forge SMS, at least one can have a plausible deniability if their SMS got intercepted and read.
thathndude 5y ago
I’m willing to bet that for every drug deal facilitated on Telegram, there are 2x+ being facilitated on the WhatsApp and SMS networks of Germany.
ahiknsr 5y ago
> say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker if those stickers contained email address rather than telegram channel then would we consider banning email services? Blocking Telegram because it is being used for drugs is absurd. Telegram is a messenger and if people are using it for drugs then what do you expect Telegram to do?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ce4 5y ago
and also: recently I get dragged into "free-thinking" circles, the same mechanism as with crypto and other spam applies. Apparently bots harvest accounts from big public groups, and once you join them the querdenker-spam appears. It also doesn't help when Telegram doesnt act on laws being broken on their platform as well as being out of reach and effectively evading jurisdiction. Also: My guess is that moderation is worse for non-english content. Just search via the "users and groups nearby" feature and you'll find drugs, prostitution, racist groups, vaccination certificate "services", covid denial groups and so on. It's a cesspool of shady stuff you won't find that easily on other messengers. Addendum: the 1.5gb-per-file file-sharing feature is also frequently used for piracy. There's PDF bots for serving NYT paywalled content and so on.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
What the F do you mean by all over Hamburg? I only see them around Sternschanze, St.Pauli and sometimes in and around stations of the Hoch-/S-Bahn, but much less, and more random. Ottensen? Almost none. Elbvororte? None, with the exception of the stations. Blankenese? None. Not even the station. Berliner Tor? Sticker heavy, but nothing special caught my eye so far. Although I haven't had a need to be there for about 4 months. Hm, Jungfernstieg. Clean. Hafencity. Clean. Reeperbahn maybe? No clue, I avoid being there as much as possible. Same goes for Hauptbahnhof.

iqanq 5y ago

I don't see the issue. People (should) have a right to meet other people with similar interests and organise.

lima 5y ago
Yes, but there's limits - like similar interests in extremism, calls to violence, assassination plots...
- iqanq 5y ago
  Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do.
  - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    We made the decision because the law is not a arbitrary thing it gets implemented because of what is written in our constitution and by law makers that we voted into place. If you want to change the law do it politically and get a majority like we did with cannabis and stop rambling about "freedoms" on the internet.
    - amadeuspagel 5y ago
      > stop rambling about "freedoms" To ramble about something means to talk about it in a confused way. If you find something specific confusing about the way the parent comment talks about "freedoms", maybe you should point that out. (Of course the parent comment doesn't talk about "freedoms" at all, confused or not.)
      - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
        > Everybody wants to be the one who decides what is extreme and what is mainstream so they can silence and ostracise those who don't think the way they do. Not everybody in the world wants to be the one who decides what is extreme or mainstream. He fears to be silenced and ostracized or that his right to free speech will be suppressed. That all because there could be a possibility that a for-profit company gets forbidden that is not complying with the laws of the country it itself is operating in. This is rambling.
  - lima 5y ago
    It's a fine line, and it's why a functioning democracy and judicial system is so important in finding the right balance (and ensuring there's public oversight[2]). One of the most important values in German politics is the concept of "wehrhafte Demokratie"[1], essentially, the idea that Germany can't ever again let the democratic system be defeated by populists, even a majority. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_democracy#Germany [2]: Personally, I'm not a fan of having underpaid teams of "content moderators" in charge of deciding what constitutes acceptable public discourse precisely because there's insufficient democratic oversight. It's also a horrible, psychologically taxing job. It's a hard problem that won't be solved by ignoring it.
- larryflint 5y ago
- Applejinx 5y ago
  And this is in Germany. They have seen extremism and calls to violence. I can't think of any nation with more of a right—even a duty—to manage its society and prevent society-level mass crimes.
  - Thiez 5y ago
    That's a strange thing to say. Are you suggesting that the German people are especially vulnerable to committing society-level mass crimes (compared to other nationalities) and thus have a duty (to who?) to be extra vigilant and tough on themselves?
- orbifold 5y ago
  Arguably in a well run society those groups would have so little power / influence that they wouldn’t be limited by how well they are able to communicate privately. The student protests in the 70s and coocurring terror campaign was not happening in a vacuum but because former Nazis had been part of all aspects of post-war Germany and young people were not having it.
lampe3 5y ago
So its okay for people to leak addresses of politicians and call on other to kill them? They match your interests and they can organize. Oh wait I know you yourself know nothing about this situation. Oh wait you yourself never got death threats to your personal mail and home? Oh wait its not like the article is saying that closing it would be the last resort...
- halfdan 5y ago
  Whataboutism isn't helping. Obviously the answer to your question is no, but you could do the same with snailmail.
  - lampe3 5y ago
    Not that easy, not that cheap, not that open and not on that scale. Which are all important points. And again Telegram is breaking german/eu law and they are ignoring it even if they get a letter.
- iqanq 5y ago
  That argument is not honest. There already are laws against doxing and threats. We don't need to censor a whole platform because of that. Especially if it's done just so we can conveniently muzzle groups that just want to protest against masks, vaccines, or lockdowns.
  - lima 5y ago
    But that's the point - Telegram refuses to honor these laws. There are court rulings demanding Telegram to remove content, which Telegram ignores, hence the threats of banning the entire platform.
    - polski-g 5y ago
      Does telegram have employees in Germany? Why would the German government have control over any corporation on the planet?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sandworm101 5y ago
Organize what? Hate? Violence? Countries have been invaded for allowing certain like-minded people to meet and organize things within thier boarders. Lets not pretend that all speech should be free. Every country on earth limits criminal activity, limits those wanting to organize violence or rampant illegality.
pjc50 5y ago
Organizing a crime in conjunction with other people is an offence in basically every jurisdiction, including the US.
- Brian_K_White 5y ago
  But the mailman who carried the coordinating communications is not guilty of participating in that coordination, doesn't open and read the mail, and the postal service is not shut down when the activity is discovered. Perhaps some would say "Ah but it's possible to intercept and open someone's mail, and that's the difference!" Probably with a warrant an individual's mail can be intercepted, but if the letter inside were written in code, then tbats as far as that goes. It's not up to the postal service to break the code or prevent communication in code. It's impossible anyway since code doesn't have to look like code. In this case maybe Telegram is like if the postal service also wrote the code but really the code is more like the envelope. The a alogies get fuzzy of course. Is the envelope maybe really tcp/ip? or is that the road? Or is the road the fiberoptic cable? You have to go back to just examining the essential facts and implications: It has never been illegal to send a letter with envelopes that block light or expose tampering, and has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code. Anyone could write an impossible law, but it would still be impossible. Any communication at all no matter what it looks like, could be code. So there is no defensible/actionable way to have a problem with either a letter carrier, or the act of writing a letter in code. And those are the two things Telegram does or facilitates, and so do countless other services and channels.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    > has never been and cannot be illegal to communicate by code This is a very sweeping statement that is false for lots of places and times; while Germany is at the supportive end of encryption various other EU countries have mandatory key disclosure to law enforcement. Even in the US it's illegal to make encrypted radio transmissions on certain bands. It is a poor argument to make the it would be impossible for Germany to criminalize encrypted communication. They can do it, even if it would be ineffective and widely subverted.
Arnt 5y ago
Some right or every right? There's a difference between the right for you and a few others to set up a group when you already know each other, and the right for you to search for those others by interest. Technically: Private groups are different from groups that are publicly searchable by or or more of name/blurb/message content.

theshrike79 5y ago

What if I distributed stickers with a phone number where to call to get drugs? Would Germany ban phones? If I did it with an email address, would they ban email? :)

lelandfe 5y ago
Not a popular statement on HN, nor one I relish making, but both of those can usually be intercepted by the state and reviewed. So less ban and more investigate. I think we can all admit that end to end encrypted messaging is a thorny problem as far as police work is concerned.
pjc50 5y ago
In the phone case, they would obviously put out a wiretap order: https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Nachrichtendienste/Telekommunikationsueberwachung.html https://www.bfdi.bund.de/EN/Buerger/Inhalte/Nachrichtendiens...

bijant 5y ago

It's not like you need Telegram to buy Drugs in Hamburg. There are places like the U-Bahn Sternschanze or the Hafentreppe where Dealers have been continuously offering light and hard drugs for over a decade with an uptime that puts FAANG SLAs to shame. They occasionally get raided whenever the police wants to have their pictures in the local papers but it's not like there is anything you could get via Telegram that you couldn't get through a five minute walk. The only difference is that the Dealers protect their turf, so Telegram opens new avenues for competing dealers to enter the market.

EGreg 5y ago
I have seen this argument over and over but there is a power law and authorities just need to cut off the head off the probability distribution. Centralized messengers are no hydra.
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  Just wait until German police discovers a thing called SMS. Right now, we are lucky that Fax is still a thing in Germany, and the whole internet thing is just a "Neuland" (new land), as ex-chancellor Merkel admitted.
  - EGreg 5y ago
    Oh yes, because local telecommunication companies delivering SMS using archaic, non-end-to-end encrypted protocols are TOTALLY more resilient to government censorship than Telegram :-P Look, when it comes to SMS and craigslist-style things etc. I bet they will want to just keep them up so they can act as a dragnet for the fools who use them to organize criminal activity.
    - tut-urut-utut 5y ago
      I'm not telling that SMS is secure. S stands for short, not secure. But given how easy it is to fake and forge SMS, at least one can have a plausible deniability if their SMS got intercepted and read.

thathndude 5y ago

I’m willing to bet that for every drug deal facilitated on Telegram, there are 2x+ being facilitated on the WhatsApp and SMS networks of Germany.

ahiknsr 5y ago

> say what you want there are stickers all over Hamburg asking you to join telegram channels if you need drugs, if you are racist or a so called "querdenker if those stickers contained email address rather than telegram channel then would we consider banning email services? Blocking Telegram because it is being used for drugs is absurd. Telegram is a messenger and if people are using it for drugs then what do you expect Telegram to do?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ce4 5y ago

and also: recently I get dragged into "free-thinking" circles, the same mechanism as with crypto and other spam applies. Apparently bots harvest accounts from big public groups, and once you join them the querdenker-spam appears. It also doesn't help when Telegram doesnt act on laws being broken on their platform as well as being out of reach and effectively evading jurisdiction. Also: My guess is that moderation is worse for non-english content. Just search via the "users and groups nearby" feature and you'll find drugs, prostitution, racist groups, vaccination certificate "services", covid denial groups and so on. It's a cesspool of shady stuff you won't find that easily on other messengers. Addendum: the 1.5gb-per-file file-sharing feature is also frequently used for piracy. There's PDF bots for serving NYT paywalled content and so on.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago

What the F do you mean by all over Hamburg? I only see them around Sternschanze, St.Pauli and sometimes in and around stations of the Hoch-/S-Bahn, but much less, and more random. Ottensen? Almost none. Elbvororte? None, with the exception of the stations. Blankenese? None. Not even the station. Berliner Tor? Sticker heavy, but nothing special caught my eye so far. Although I haven't had a need to be there for about 4 months. Hm, Jungfernstieg. Clean. Hafencity. Clean. Reeperbahn maybe? No clue, I avoid being there as much as possible. Same goes for Hauptbahnhof.