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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

#571

Post by cbsmith »

nomdep wrote: post #509
ajross wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y'know, illegal.

I'm appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime. Why aren't all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.

Gun manufacturers have repeatedly been charged with crimes (some are currently in court). I'd argue that messaging platforms have, historically, been less likely to be charged with crimes.

The second amendment gives weapon makers some extra protection in the US, but they do have to be very careful about what they do and do not do in order to avoid going to jail.

> They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.

Do you have the stats on that? I don't, but I'm curious. While I don't doubt the vast majority of people using Telegram aren't committing a crime, I know that the vast majority of people using guns also aren't committing a crime.

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

#572

Post by alephnerd »

coliveira wrote: post #561
tialaramex wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TV drama tends to give people the wrong idea. Your lawyers aren't allowed to aid you with doing any crimes, they're just advocates.

This happens in real life all the time, just look at Trump's lawyer.

And they get suspended or disbarred as well as referred to LE.

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

#573

Post by cbsmith »

scotty79 wrote: post #412
Almondsetat wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I bet they wouldn't refuse Apparently, they have. Sorry for your bet.

Maybe they didn't ask nicely. Or they asked for something else. There's literally zero drawback for service provider to provide secret access to the raw data that they hold to law enforcement. You'd be criminally dumb if you didn't do it. Literally criminally. I bet that if they really asked, they pretty much asked Telegram to build them one click creator that would print them court ready documents about criminals on…

> There's literally zero drawback for service provider to provide secret access to the raw data that they hold to law enforcement.

That's not true. For one things, it is expensive. For another, there's a chance people will find out and you'll lose all your criminal customers... they might even seek retribution.

> I bet that if they really asked, they pretty much asked Telegram to build them one click creator that would print them court ready documents about criminals on their platform so that law enforcement can just click a button and yell "we got one!" to the judge.

You seem to believe, without having looked at the publicly available facts of the matter, that the problem is law enforcement didn't say "pretty please". The fact of the matter is that they've refused proper law enforcement requests repeatedly; if anyone has been rude about it, it's been Durov.

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

#574

Post by hnpolicestate »

sharpshadow wrote: post #552
rgreekguy wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Reddit it is a bit documented how some power-mods used to flood subreddits with child porn to get them taken down. It was seemingly done with the administration's best wishes. Not sure if it still going on, but some of these people are certainly around, in the same positions.

That’s disgusting but certainly effective to take down something very quickly. I was very disappointed to hear that UFO related subreddits take down and block UFO sightings. What’s the whole point of the sub if they censor the relevant content.

This is unrelated to main thread but since you brought up UFOs and censorship. Isn't it a disgrace what Wikipedia has done to the trove of "list of UFO sightings"?

Those listings were great and well documented up until about 2019 or so. They've been scrubbed heavily.

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

#575

Post by dawnerd »

smt88 wrote: post #536
calgarymicro wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arrest tells us that he said no to one country, it doesn't say much about all the others.

Russian govt officials are protesting his arrest. When an authoritarian govt is calling for the release of someone who runs a "private" messenger, it suggests they have a back door. Otherwise they tend to oppose all private messaging.

Russia was also using it for “secret” chats and are probably terrified what could be exposed.

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

#576

Post by MertsA »

KaiserPro wrote: post #301
1oooqooq wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the founder exit letter. whatsapp is definitely not e2e encrypted for all features. You leak basic metadata (who talked to who at what time). You leak 100% of messages with "business account", which are another way to say "e2e you->meta and then meta relays the message e2e to N reciptients handling that business account". Then there's the all the links and images which are sent to e2e you->meta, meta stores the…

> with "business account", which are another way to say "e2e you->meta and then meta relays actually its a nominated end point, and then from there its up to the business. It works out better for meta, because they aren't liable for the content if something goes wrong. (ie a secret is leaked, or PII gets out.) Great for GDPR because as they aren't acting as processor of PII they are less likley to be taken to court.…

iMessage is not on the same playing field as Whatsapp and Signal. Apple has full control over key distribution and virtually no one verifies Apple isn't acting as a MitM. Whatsapp and e2e encrypted messenger force you to handle securely linking multiple devices to your account and gives you the option to verify that Meta isn't providing bogus public keys to break the e2e encryption.

https://engineering.fb.com/2023/04/13/security/whatsapp-key-...

For iMessage, Apple can just add a fake iDevice to your account and now iMessage will happily encrypt everything to that new key as well and there's zero practical visibility to the user. If it was a targeted attack and not blanket surveillance then there's no way the target is going to notice. You can open up the keychain app and check for yourself but unless you regularly do this and compare the keys between all your Apple products you can't be sure. I don't even know how to do that on iPhone.

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

#577

Post by alexey-salmin »

devman0 wrote: post #99

A lot of really terrible takes in this comment section. Telegram didn't have encrypted groups by default, and telegram possessed a lot of content on their servers that they had been made aware was illegal and didn't cooperate. Nothing more, nothing less. The comparisons to other providers is off base because either other providers are cooperating more when they possess actionable, unencrypted information and taking s…

> One cannot legally run a hosted, unmoderated content platform in the developed world, one will always be required to remove illegal materials and turn over materials in cooperation with law enforcement.

Should you remove e.g blasphemy which is illegal in many countries including some of what I assume you call "developed world"?

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

#578

Post by MertsA »

archerx wrote: post #280
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?

I find it funny that they claim to be “end-to-end” at least once they have censored one of my messages.

For some trivial client side filtering that still makes it e2e encrypted.

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

#579

Post by sharpshadow »

lxgr wrote: post #298
itohihiyt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a crime not to report a crime, at least not where I live. But facilitating a crime, which is something you could accuse telegram of is.

> I don't think it's a crime not to report a crime That heavily depends on the jurisdiction. It's explicitly a crime in Germany, for example: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__138.html On top of that, if you can be shown to benefit from the crime (e.g. by knowingly taking payment for providing services to those that commit it), that presumably makes you more than just a bystander in most jurisdictions anyway.

It is only for specific crimes not all crimes and there are exemptions when you don’t have to report the crime in Germany. For example family members don’t have to report if they try to convince the other party not to do it. Priests and other religious figures don’t have to do it. Lawyers, physicians, therapists etc. are also exempted.

It is also only for upcoming not yet accomplished crimes. Crimes already happened don’t have to be reported.

Also it has to be proven that you received the plan in a plausibel manner.

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

#580

Post by dawnerd »

akira2501 wrote: post #538
Muromec wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try to deposit 10k to your bank account and then, when they call you and ask the obvious question, answer that you sold some meth or robbed someone. They will totally be fine with this answer, as they are just a platform for providing money services and well, you can always just pay for everything in cash.

If you deposit more than 10k the IRS simply gets automatically notified. No one calls you to ask where you got the money. The IRS actually expects you to report income earned from illegal activities, they _explicitly_ state this in Publication 17.

And even then you don’t have to tell them it’s illegal. Just what you earned. Frankly they don’t care where it came from as long as you report and pay.
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