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Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

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Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#211

Post by scotty79 »

jsheard wrote: post #86
saintfrancis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Meta cooperate with the authorities? Isn't Whatsapp supposed to be end-to-end encrypted?

Telegram is for the most part not end-to-end encrypted, one to one chats can be but aren't by default, and groups/channels are never E2EE. That means Telegram is privy to a large amount of the criminal activity happening on their platform but allegedly chooses to turn a blind eye to it, unlike Signal or WhatsApp, who can't see what their users are doing by design. Not to say that deliberately making yourself blind to…

If law enforcement asked them nicely for access I bet they wouldn't refuse. Why take responsibility for something if you can just offload it to law enforcement?

The issue is law enforcement doesn't want that kind of access. Because they have no manpower to go after criminals. This would increase their caseload hundredfold within a month. So they prefer to punish the entity that created this honeypot. So it goes away and along with it the crime will go back underground where police can pretend it doesn't happen.

Telegram is basically punished for existing and not doing law enforcement job for them.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#212

Post by simianparrot »

Infinity315 wrote: post #47
mazambazz wrote: post #29

This seems like the Kim Dotcom situation again. Why are these service providers being punished for what their users do? Specifically, these service providers? Because Google, Discord, Reddit, etc. all contain some amount of CSAM (and other illegal content), yet I don't see Pichai, Citron, or Huffman getting indicted for anything. Hell, then there's the actual infrastructure providers too. This seems like a slippery s…

Because those services don't get shown reports of CSAM and then turn a blind eye to it and do nothing about it. A person witnessing a crime by itself is not a crime. However, a person witnessing a crime and choosing not to report it is a crime.

YouTube ignored reports for CSAM links in comments of "family videos" of children bathing for years until a channel that made a large report on it went viral.

Who you are definitely determines how the law handles you. If you're Google execs, you don't have to worry about the courts of the peasantry.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#213

Post by negus »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #153
negus wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See my comment above about the unencrypted backup. It's basically a UX tradeoff: You can not promote default E2E + no autobackups -- people in mass are not ready to lose their data when losing the device. Nor they are ready to store the key separately in a confidential manner. Nor they are ready to manually transfer the key among different devices. All this UX situation is defined by Moxie (the author of Signal and W…

Backups are encrypted now. Looks like they improved it. I get it. I'm a privacy and free and open source software enthusiast. It's not perfect. It certainly is better than alternatives though. We know for a fact that it pisses off judges and authorities. That's a major sign that its working. You should be concerned when they stop complaining about it, it means they got in.

But this very same situation with Pavel's arrest aligns with your criteria of "authority-pissing" tech.

Have you checked the source of Telegram? https://telegram.org/apps#source-code

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#214

Post by firesteelrain »

firesteelrain wrote: post #97
jeroenhd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal has the better protocol and the better organisation behind it, but inferior apps and UX. It's unfortunate, really.

Apps? I just use it for messaging. I haven’t noticed any major UX issues but I use it for one thing only

On my Signal app screen, I have Chats, Calls and Stories. I could probably do without Stories. Periodically it prompts me for my PIN.

Other than that it just works

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#215

Post by contravariant »

So money laundering, drugs, terrorism and child porn plus some others for good measure. Were they deliberately trying to invoke all four horsemen of the infocalypse, or is that a side effect?

Had they sticked with just one I may have been less likely to view it this as an authoritarian attack on privacy and freedom of speech.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#216

Post by croes »

331c8c71 wrote: post #40

Whoa, it's absurd if true... I fail to see how being responsible for not cooperating with authorities can be turned into being accused of these crimes. And I don't care for the legal gymnastics which makes this possible - the law exists to serve the public interest and is of no inherent value.

Wasn't the Silk Road founder jailed for something similar?

He provided the platform.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#217

Post by brabel »

mlyle wrote: post #104
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is misinformation that Telegram stores chat data in plaintext on their servers. It stores it encrypted with encryption keys split across the globe. Not perfect, but multiple legal jurisdictions would have to be subpoenad for Telegram to read your non-secret chats.

This is effectively plaintext, in that one entity has all of those secrets for everyone. That's one entity to subpoena. If that entity doesn't comply, governments will get upset and charge your executives with crimes if they get the chance. Different jurisdictions makes it harder to kick down the doors and get the keys, but it doesn't change the fundamental problem. "Nuh-uh, I put all those records in a box in Switze…

This is such an ignorant comment I am really disappointed at reading this here.

Besides the protocol used by Telegram being publicly available so you can easily confirm in 5 minutes that what you're saying is completely wrong, but you're also saying that law enforcement can totally see all those plain text messages hosted by Telegram, yet they choose to be really upset about it anyway despite it being, according to you, the best possible honeypot ever created with all criminal activity readily available for their peruse. Why, I ask you, would law enforcement want to stop such an app??? They would be completely silent about it and enjoy catching all criminals in it who are "ignorantly" thinking their messages are safe, wouldn't they??

Given the amount of baseless comments like yours on this topic, I can only imagine there's a concerted effort here to misinform everyone to make Telegram look bad so actual criminals move away from it to some more law enforcement-friendly platform. I have conflicting feelings about that, as perhaps the intention is noble, but I can never agree with misleading people by spreading misinformation and plain lies.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#218

Post by layer8 »

nicolas_t wrote: post #175

I was fully expecting him to be arrested by a third world dictatorship somewhere but, no it's my home country, France. I'm ashamed of my country. Most of the traffic on Telegram is not even encrypted... EDIT: Yes, reading more about it, nothing to see here, it's not about encryption...

This is not about encryption, it’s about lack of cooperation with the authorities, and breaking French law as a French citizen.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#220

Post by bloopernova »

dagmx wrote: post #185
NayamAmarshe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are stored in plaintext on telegram servers FYI, this is a totally misleading and false claim. Telegram uses the MTProto 2.0 Cloud algorithm for non-secret chats[1][2]. In fact, it uses a split-key encryption system and the servers are all stored in multiple jurisdictions. So even Telegram employees can't decrypt the chats, because you'd need to compromise all the servers at the same time. Telegram's algorithm…

Unless I’m missing something, your mproto link only covers transport level encryption not storage. It doesn’t include E2E encryption in the scheme only client to server. Whether the server stores it as plaintext or not, is moot to the point of having telegram itself be able to see the chats because they hold the encryption keys of the server and therefore can be made to comply with legal requests. The person you repl…

I can't open the telegram.com links, blocked at work :/

But the Arxiv paper says:

"We stress that peer clients never communicate directly: messages always go through a server, where they are stored to permit later retrieval by the recipient. Cloud chat messages are kept in clear text, while secret chat messages are encrypted with the peers’ session key, which should be unknown to the server."

So it doesn't appear to be encrypted-at-rest, but without reading the telegram documentation I can't verify that.

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