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Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

reuters.com

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Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#141

Post by rndgermandude »

guerrilla wrote: post #71
bijant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.tagesschau.de/investigativ/funk/todesdrohungen-t... „In Germany, alleged individual cases of calls for killing from the lateral thinker scene have been discussed for days. Research now shows that there have been calls to kill every day since mid-November.“ https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/telegram-verfassungsschutz-... „Radicalized Corona Deniers What can the state do about Telegram? Corona deniers use th…

Oh yeah, that's very comprehensive. Thanks. Funny, it fits so well.

It's only scratching the surface of the reporting, there is much more. Some of the reporting might be due to "collective panic", but a lot of the reporting is due to telegram choosing to stay oblivious to groups that constantly abuse the service to make terrorism plans, e.g. recently a plan to murder the minister of health of a federal state, or groups with tens of thousands of members constantly publishing "traitor" lists of politicians, journalists and other public figures along with their private addresses, names of family members and even schools their kids visit, demanding the group members "inform" these "traitors" and their families that they will be hanged for their actions soon.

At least last bit isn't just journalists making up stuff. I saw "queerdenker" stickers in my city giving a telegram link, which curious as I am checked out, and one of the first things I saw was somebody sharing a list of "Volksverräter" ("traitors to the people") followed by a lot of "hang them" comments by other people.

I distinctly remember one person commenting that he had already sent a letter to one of the politicians containing a "Hinrichtungsbefehl" (order for execution) he cobbled together, of which he posted a screenshot. It was single page letter meant to look "official" that listed "crimes" (such as treason) the politician was supposed to have committed, and concluded that therefore the politician was to be hanged or executed by a firing squad (choice of the politician, isn't that nice? :P). The consensus of people in that group replying to that guy was that the letter was a good one, with some suggestions on how to improve it in the future.

The group and the list in the chat history were still up a week later, so neither the group moderators nor telegram removed it.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#142

Post by fileeditview »

martin_a wrote: post #54
progx wrote: post #21

Quoted post unavailable.

Readers beware: Don't get fooled by this comment. These "Spaziergänge" are an unholy mixture of racists, anti-democratic groups, anti-vaxxers and lots more. The far right has found "new friends" in the people critizing the Covid rules of the government. They are now marching side by side, obviously trying to make their far right positions look "not that bad" by blending in with the others. Yesterday they were marchin…

Not agreeing with your world view does not make people "an unholy mixture of racists, anti-democratic groups, anti-vaxxers and lots more". You just show your ignorance and the lack of accepting a difference in opinion.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#143

Post by Brian_K_White »

pjc50 wrote: post #120
iqanq wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Organizing a crime in conjunction with other people is an offence in basically every jurisdiction, including the US.

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.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#144

Post by iqanq »

vetinari wrote: post #139
iqanq wrote: post #12

On an unrelated note - Telegram is already heavily censored on iPhones because of app store policies and the team refuses to put out an uncensored IPA file that we can sideload to our phones. If someone from the team reads this (I doubt it, since they are very disconnected from western media) please consider it. You already do it for Android!

It is not possible to do what you are asking for on iOS. They do it for Android because it is possible to sideload apks, but they cannot do the same for iOS.

You can sideload apps on ios without even being jailbroken using sideloadly or altstore.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#145

Post by vetinari »

Aerroon wrote: post #13
uniqueuid wrote: post #5

This will be interesting. Some background for the discussion: - Germany has a different take on freedom of speech from the US. There are things that you cannot say (holocaust denial, inciting racial violence). We can argue about this, but it's deeply ingrained in the legal system and unrealistic to change - Germany has a special law regulating responsibilities and content moderation in social media (NetzDG, think sec…

Sadly, cutting out Germany means that you'd eventually have to cut out the entire EU. If you just block Germany they're going to push on the EU to take up this fight for them. It'll all be in the name of "stopping online abuse" or something like that. Germany, in general, seems to be a very poor country to do digital business compared to most other places. This is the same country that required (requires?) streamers…

> Sadly, cutting out Germany means that you'd eventually have to cut out the entire EU.

Not really; some countries would be against just because it is Germany pushing for it. If necessary, they would call out Germany doing the nazi thing, again, and forcing the rest of Europe to do the same, again.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#146

Post by vetinari »

iqanq wrote: post #144
vetinari wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not possible to do what you are asking for on iOS. They do it for Android because it is possible to sideload apks, but they cannot do the same for iOS.

You can sideload apps on ios without even being jailbroken using sideloadly or altstore.

So you need Apple Developer account and these apps sign ipas using your own key?

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#147

Post by ekianjo »

odiroot wrote: post #9

The collective panic and Luddism about Telegram in Germany is really scary. I watch Tagesschau (probably most respected news show) every evening. Any time Telegram is mentioned it's always being attacked, as if it's only purpose was to enable crime and terrorism.

> Any time Telegram is mentioned it's always being attacked, as if it's only purpose was to enable crime and terrorism.

When the media is used as propaganda - surely this has never happened before?

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#148

Post by vetinari »

oleg_antonyan wrote: post #50

They tried to block it in Russia in 2018. And failed miserably. Blocking entire subnets, millions of IP addresses on AWS, DigitalOcean and other providers, but Telegram servers can hope between different instances, so it ended up as wack-a-moll where thousands of innocents sites were blocked including some government-related services, banks, payment processing, my little startup project hosted on DO, but not Telegram

In 2018, domain fronting was a thing. Since then, it became more difficult, as the cloud providers prohibited it.

However, to compensate, there's now encrypted SNI, so the situation is returning back to the 2018 one.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#149

Post by tut-urut-utut »

EGreg wrote: post #138
tut-urut-utut wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Germany doesn't rule out closing Telegram – interior minister

#150

Post by foepys »

beardedman wrote: post #136

You've had censorship in Germany for a very long time now, but I don't think people like to think of it as censorship. You (literally) can land up in jail for verbalising certain things. IMO, the scary part is how positively people view this, like it's a feature (and then proceed to talk about the CCP or Russia like they are stuck in the mid 1500's).

> You (literally) can land up in jail for verbalising certain things.

Go to the US, go to a police officer, and just tell them you want to kill the President.

Watch what happens.

There is no such thing as absolute free speech, even in the US.

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