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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

#321

It's interesting that he chose to fly to France knowing fully well that he will be arrested. It is also not surprising, because he has French citizenship and France does not extradite its citizens. Looks like a tactical move on his part when his legal team told him he ran out of options and he much preferred to spend time in a French prison than in a Federal prison in the US.

didn't france put out the arrest warrant right before he got there to trap him?

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

#322

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…

Watch his interview with Tucker Carlson and you’ll see. He doesn’t acquiesce to government requests for moderation control, censorship, and sharing private user data so they target him. He refuses to implement backdoors as well. In stark contrast to western social media companies.

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

#323
post #241

By all accounts, this looks to me like it's nothing else but a politically motivated decision - and it gives ever more credence to my take that there is no freedom of speech in Europe As a side note, this is somewhat reminiscent of how the Catholic Church operated at the height of its power - do what we say or burn at the stake. We should then not be surprised that no longer does technological innovation happen in Eu…

It is unrelated to technological innovation (in the short run). I expect the same result in US. Europe is not united enough to have a separate from US opinion.

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

#324
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than this. The author argues that backdoors are necessary rather than simply being willing to share his/her data for inspection.

That's how most law works. I have to give up my right to murder someone in order to enjoy a society where it's illegal for everyone. If you believe privacy not inspectable by law enforcement is wrong the prerequisite is saying that you're willing to have the the law apply to you as well.

I believe that privacy not inspectable by law enforcement is a fundamental right. I'm willing to accept that aids some crimes but also willing to change my mind if the latter becomes too much of a problem. It doesn't seem to be the case at all ATM.

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

#325
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah that feels pretty cut and dry. But even if it was encrypted at rest, it sounds like the server has the key to everything anyway so it’s not E2E.

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

#326
post #9

I really hope this doesn't become an "encryption bad" cudgel. > The main accusation by EU authorities concerns Telegram’s encrypted messaging services, which were allegedly used to facilitate organised crime. One investigator stated that ‘Telegram has become the number one platform for organised crime over the years’, underlining the perceived link between the platform’s privacy features and criminal activities. It's…

For centuries snail mail was used to facilitate organized crime, yet nobody prosecutes post offices.

I’m sure a post office would definitely refuse a legal request to intercept the mail.

Guess not: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_interception

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

#327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You ask for the post to get approved. You probably can't imagine the amount of spam subreddits suffer under.

In the cases I remember there was no such recourse. It was just autodeleted by a bot.

You have to send the moderators a message manually. They can unhide comments held by AutoMod.

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

#329
post #217
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Law enforcement totally could see all those plaintext messages, if Telegram would honor their requests. But they don't, hence their CEO is being detained.

That's a position he knowingly and willingly maneuvered himself into. Compare that with e.g. the way Signal answers subpoenas: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

> 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

There's absolutely no need to analyzse the protocol, since you can just perform a high-level mud puddle test [1], and Telegram fails it. I've tried this myself.

[1] https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2012/04/05/icloud-w...

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

#330

> jpost.com > • 5 hours ago > Pavel Durov, Telegram founder, arrested by France following warrant - The Jerusalem Post > The alleged offenses include: terrorism, narcotic supply, fraud, money laundering and receiving stolen goods. For those unaware, all channel on telegram are NOT ENCRYPTED. They are stored in plaintext on telegram servers. All chats that are not 'secret chat' mode (single device to single device) ar…

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.

> Not perfect, but multiple legal jurisdictions would have to be subpoenad for Telegram to read your non-secret chats.

Thats not how legal works.

for example if I am an EU based judge and I issue a warrant for getting data from a company in a case related to something important (your values may vary, but lets say its not about parking fines) then if your company wants to continue to operate in the EU, you need to pony up the data, or tell them why your can't comply, rather than won't

Having your data stored with keys that you control isn't an excuse.

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