Telegram founder: US intelligence tried to bribe us to weaken encryption

There aren't a lot of places that are embracing truly end-to-end encryption for the masses. I think it would be tough in the U.S. but it's not clear to me where the better place.

There is no need for the US intelligence do to that, looking at the choices Telegram made on its own.

Assuming this isn't just PR, in some ways this is scary and disheartening.

But my first reaction was "Cool, our government really cares, is creative and has the necessary power to get things done."

For those of you who've worked with government, you've seen how insanely difficult the procurement process is. Being as specific as needing to get competitive bids for toilet paper purchases, etc. So the fact that they could get potentially large amounts of bribe money means (a)This goes to high levels in the organization (b)They've probably done this before.

I wonder how much they offered?

And I wonder how many other pieces of software have backdoors. I would think the first things they would try and get access to is (a)Certificate issuers and (b) VPN software.

Do we know that Godaddy,LetsEncrypt, OpenVPN, Cisco VPN, Juniper, etc don't have backdoors?

> Cool, our government really cares

I wonder what they really care about? Liberty, individual rights, security, or more power? They're people too, so I'm sure they believe in the first three, but the last one is a more seductive and drives a lot more of the bad we see governments do; worse is that the drive for more power is frequently justified as "we need this power to protect our nation".

> has the necessary power to get things done

This actually frightens me a bit. The US government has the ability (and has displayed the willingness) to absolutely destroy people's lives in their pursuit of "national security". What checks and balances are in place to keep this kind of power in check?

This is pretty alarming stuff.

Especially considering how that competitors like Signal are US based. Signal is owned by twitter which by no means is a small player, so it isn't likely to fly under anyones radar.