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But here's the thing. If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable. You run a carrier service. Much

• codedokode 2y ago
  What do you mean by "knowingly providing a service to a criminal"? Is Elon Mask then guilty for providing access to Twitter for Trump?
  • gtvwill 2y ago
    Well much like the owner of omegle found out you can't provide platforms for criminal activities and make no effort to curb it. It only takes a 30 second google before you find telegram rooms offering all kinds of illegal stuff. You don't find that on Twitter. Twitter is atleast mildly moderated. Telegram could have moderation built in to catch illegal activities but it chooses to do nothing. See the difference?
    • chad1n 2y ago
      Telegram is end-to-end encrypted in private chats, the Telegram team doesn't even know what people are discussing. Same should happen with Whatsapp or Signal. Should Whatsapp or Signal be accountable for what terrorists talk in private?
      • gtvwill 2y ago
        App can have internal keyword check that could open backdoor to law enforcement when certain terms are said. *fbi enters the conversation* probably won't be in your chat log anytime soon but you can't argue telegram, signal and whatsapp can't do it. Whatsapp being fbs darling almost certainly does already and signal servers anti spam folder is smelling mighty like a five eyes backdoor. Tbh given both those apps company's have dealings with gov in aus I'm gonna say signals probably already got a backdoor into em. If you don't think so you don't know aus law well enough or who signals are. Also the owners of the apps aren't liable for the content of the conversations. Their liable for providing a platform for the conversation to take place and for not knowingly taking available efforts to curb criminal activity on that platfor/service. It's like hey I'm gonna rent you a store house to hide all your illegal drugs in Mr gang member. I'm not doing the hiding or anything but I'm assisting the activity by providing the store house. I could make efforts to curb such activity like you know doing a rental inspection once every six months but I choose not to and turn a blind eye. Am I assisting a crime or am I completely innocent? Now repeat this but telegram is the store house.
        • codedokode 2y ago
          Telegram has an open-source client and is moving to verifiable builds (not on every platform). You cannot hide such a backdoor, and users would be able to recompile a clean version of the app.
      • wwtrv 2y ago
        > Telegram is end-to-end encrypted in private chats Not by default (unlike the other services you've mentioned )?
    • a0123 2y ago
      The fun fact is that while Telegram won't make use of something akin to PicDNA to automatically detect CSAM, it will very happily take down your channel or group if you distribute copyrighted material. They do know how to respond to copyright complaints. Not so much about other, far more serious sort of illegal activities. Just on that point, they should have expected something to be done against them.
    • hilux 2y ago
      > It only takes a 30 second google before you find telegram rooms offering all kinds of illegal stuff. For fun, I tried that and was unsuccessful, at least in the allotted time. Google turned up many third-party references to illegal activity on Telegram, but that's not the same thing.
      • edm0nd 2y ago
        You have to use the Search built into Telegram and you can find illegal stuffs within seconds. Search for any of these phrases and it will return tons of channels to join: - Combo lists - Check fraud - Redline Stealer - Bank logs There are tens of thousands of channels on Telegram w illegal content and material. I really do hope they dont shut it down bc it's an extremely valuable asset in terms of intelligence and monitoring criminals haha Source: I work in CTI and actively monitor and scan thousands of Telegram channels.
        • hilux 2y ago
          I'm not sure whether to "thank" you for what sounds like my exciting new hobby!
          • edm0nd 2y ago
            It's a lot of fun and a super neat project! I totally nerd out on it. I used python and the Telethon and Pyrogram frameworks to help scrape and monitor em. A paid Telegram account can be in 1k channels/groups. A free Telegram account can be in 500 channels/groups. Good luck and happy programming!
  • gmueckl 2y ago
    Twitter already got warned about hosting Trump by the EU.
    • scrlk 2y ago
      That warning was not an official EU position: > "Thierry Breton, the French commissioner, had posted the warning letter on X, the platform owned by Musk, hours before the billionaire interviewed US presidential candidate Donald Trump, also on X." > "On Tuesday the European Commission denied Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter." https://www.ft.com/content/09cf4713-7199-4e47-a373-ed5de61c2afa https://www.ft.com/content/09cf4713-7199-4e47-a373-ed5de61c2... https://archive.ph/zugnf https://archive.ph/zugnf
      • codedokode 2y ago
        Note that the article says: > Breton is empowered to oversee enforcement of the DSA and can communicate independently with companies. So maybe he didn't need to get permission from anyone to send the letter.
        • scrlk 2y ago
          The contents of the letter are within his brief, but the timing of it was done in such a way as to impact the EU's foreign policy, which lies outside of his remit.
      • Hizonner 2y ago
        Ursula von der Leyen is not the Queen of the EU, no matter how much she'd like to be. Other people have the authority to speak and act officially without checking with her. That doesn't make their statements any less official, nor would her endorsement make them any more official.
        • scrlk 2y ago
          "Official" in the sense that the statement carries the complete backing of the institution and is a public declaration of its position. The fact that it was wound back by the head of the EU's executive branch - Breton's boss - demoted the statement to "the opinion of the commissioner".
• CactusOnFire 2y ago
  By that logic, any app that provides privacy from governments spying is a criminal enterprise.
  • zerodensity 2y ago
    Well I mean in many countries, blocking the surveillance agency from listening in on your calls/texts/chats is illegal. So making an app that interferes with the agencies ability to "listen in" is infact a criminal enterprise. Don't have to like it but the law is the law.
    • lastiteration 2y ago
      That's when people should not comply
    • biscottigelato 2y ago
      So all implementation of encryption is illegal, that's basically your stance? Because that's exactly what encryption does.
    • lenkite 2y ago
      How about adding "illegal thoughts" to that mix too. It is only one short step away from wearing a monitoring "headband". All subversion grows its first root in the mind of the citizen. Nipping this in the bud through detection and re-education guarantees peace and safety of society and the nation. If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide. Don't have to like it but the law is the law. /s
• chad1n 2y ago
  You realize that every social media/forum/messaging app should be banned then and every CEO in jail. Bad actors will use anything they can.
  • gtvwill 2y ago
    No because those platforms make the values token effort to curb illegal activity via moderation be it user performed or done by their own employees. Telegram does not do this. Anywhere at all. It's very different.
    • chad1n 2y ago
      I know chat rooms that have been nuked for Pornography etc. I reported some chats where I've seen inappropriate content and I received notifications that they were deleted. A lot of users are muted/banned too for illegal activities. It isn't exactly unmoderated, but the staff can't exactly search every single server under the sun for illegal material or activities. You probably don't know how bad Matrix is, out of 200k servers, 70k were banned for CSAM and there are still a lot of them around.
      • seszett 2y ago
        Last time I used Telegram and had a look at the "discussions around your area" or something, I couldn't find anything that wasn't about selling drugs or fake documents. It was a giant drug delivery platform. It might be different in other places but here, in a large city of continental Europe, Telegram is definitely little more than an enabler for illegal activities.
        • codedokode 2y ago
          Note that selling drugs is a victimless crime. Also, you could report those illegal posts, or you knowingly and willingly allowed criminals to continue their activities?
          • 2y ago
• echelon 2y ago
  E2EE should be a human right. Period. There are other ways to capture and ensnare criminals. Sacrificing our privacy for the "greater good" is a bridge too far. As one counter point, think about all of the completely fine human behaviors that instantly become kompromat when the powers have access to your every communication. That is way more dangerous to democracy, freedom, and liberty than a slightly smaller chance of "not protecting the children". Besides, if we actually cared so much about children, we wouldn't let them not get school lunches, we wouldn't sell them on gambling and gacha games, and we'd do a much better job of educating them.
  • chucke1992 2y ago
    Famous quote that if you sacrifice freedom for security, you will get neither.
    • GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • mandmandam 2y ago
        As was the fashion at the time, in the land of the free.
        • GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
          I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
          • mandmandam 2y ago
            And I have no idea what you think you're adding to the discussion by adding this 'context'. That phrase has a life of its own, and has stood the test of time. When someone says that e=mc2, do you feel a need to make sure everyone knows the 'context' that Einstein took credit for some of his wife's work? When someone quotes Gandhi to say "Be the change that you wish to see in the world", do you talk about him sleeping in a bed with his niece? By the way, if you live in the West then your comfortable lifestyle is based on the work of slaves of various degrees. From forced prison laborers in America to cobalt and lithium miners in Africa, to actual full-on slave markets in Libya because tptb didn't like how un-exploitable the country was getting. We're all hypocrites, and pointing that out when it's not relevant just derails discussion. Btw, Ben Franklin became an abolitionist later in life. He was elected as the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery around 1785.
• vessenes 2y ago
  I upvoted your comment so that it has a bit of visibility because I know some people think this, but I disagree with it, very strongly. First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly. Second, you propose your preferred moral economy as one that only curtails harms. In fact, you create another harm implementing what you think is right. Reasonable people disagree about which is worse -- the creation and public support of a technocratic oligarchy in control of how humans communicate or the proliferation of some harms that take advantage of unfettered communication. But please don't be simple minded, pretending to yourself or others that there aren't real costs, social and physical, on both sides of this. For myself, I think private communications are a human right and a massive good for society, and I don't condone criminal acts undertaken using messaging.
  • Barrin92 2y ago
    >First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly. and they're usually public property and policed. Routine police inspection on a road and in particular control of borders and key nodes in your transportation infrastructure isn't exactly controversial. (unless you're part of some extreme political faction). You know a lot of countries where people can drive without a license plate? Private communication is important but it has always had limits, this crypto mentality of companies exercising no compliance, having no borders, ignoring the law and national security doesn't have a precedent. Historically people communicated say in the US using an American telecommunications network which without a doubt complied with legal requests. It's not at all self evident that we should tolerate telecoms infrastructure operated by a Russian out of Dubai that is primarily used by an enemy we're effectively at war with.
    • jack_pp 2y ago
      That's because they are different, police can come with a warrant to check your house for illegal activity but they can't monitor you remotely 24/7 with barely any human intervention and store everything you do indefinitely. With electronic communication you either get full privacy or none. And no, putting company's in charge of your privacy isn't a solution, if they can be compelled to give away your communication history then they'll abuse it. Have you not learned anything from the Snowden leaks?
• garrettgarcia 2y ago
  Why stop there? By your logic, the owners of every ISP that provides a pathway for those criminal bits also should be in jail. Every single organization in that pathway would be liable from the registrars to the developers of web libraries or other app services. The governments themselves would be liable in many cases where the government has nationalized internet services. There is a principle in the free world that one is not criminally liable for the speech of others. This is the principle that allows ISP's, newspapers, web forums, Google, etc. etc. to exist. You demand that the principle be violated and the Internet be destroyed. I disagree.
  • NoboruWataya 2y ago
    > Why stop there? Because we want to, and we can. I don't get how HN consistently fails to understand the actual social and political process by which regulations are made. I constantly see this argument which effectively boils down to "if you ban a thing, you will also need to ban everything else, which is absurd, so you shouldn't ban anything". But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society. It is open to society to decide that Telegram is more proximate to the harm being caused, and less otherwise socially useful, than an ISP, and on that basis punish the former but not the latter. (It is also reasonable to argue that Telegram is not sufficiently proximate to the harm and that it is sufficiently socially useful that it should be allowed to operate, and honestly I sympathise with that argument more. But my point is that it is a matter of weighing social harm vs benefit and not just a technical analysis of "where the bits go".) If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Arguing "ah, but by that logic you'll also have to jail the guy who sold the robber his breakfast" isn't going to cut it, and rightly so.
    • alexandre_m 2y ago
      > If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Bad analogy. Better one is that your a taxi driver and someone who committed a crime hops into your car for a ride, then you’re found guilty by association.
• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. What about toilet paper? It's used by quite some criminals (not all that said: many criminals have very poor hygiene and just put their undies back on without wiping after number two). Should we arrest people manufacturing toilet paper? Anyway we all know it's not about criminals: it's about controlling speech so that protests as in Barcelona, the UK (where people who are denouncing rapes and killings are put in jail, while the actual rapists get very light sentences like only six months in jail), etc. cannot organize themselves. It's about controlling the narrative. And they're using useful idiots resorting to broken logic to push their totalitarian agenda.
• kazinator 2y ago
  Should Safeway run background checks on shoppers so as not to sell a loaf of bread to a pedophile?
• immibis 2y ago
  IIRC the owner of Omegle was never in actual trouble, but he got tired of subpoenas etc.