https://www.rt.com/news/603033-telegram-founder-paris-arrest/
The founder has been arrested in Paris on charges of abetting criminals by making a censorship resistant app. He in the past claimed the west (NSA/CIA/etc) asked him to put a backdoor in his app and for what little it’s worth he claims he refused.
Now with him in their custody, in their clutches, where they can sentence him to a brutal prison sentence for the rest of his life he may like many people be willing to cut them a deal on a backdoor so he can save his own life. Such a deal may not be publicly apparent and may even be carefully disguised and hidden behind a public legal drama that is fiction.
I don’t think any immediate emergency action is warranted but I would encourage those using it to evaluate what this means for their continued usage and the threat it presents to them say 6 months from now.
We have to wait and see, he could be cleared and leave quickly, he could face a trial which may or may not say anything about him allowing western intelligence to compromise it. As they could try and hide the fact he cut a deal behind a public apparent defeat by his lawyers if they want to keep it under wraps to better utilize such access against Russians for example who are heavy, heavy users of the app and it could present a trove of intelligence to say nothing of abilities to compromise top Russian officials were they to get in bed with the eyes agreement agencies.
Point is they snatched him at the airport when he landed and it can’t be anything but politically motivated.
At the very least I expect them to force him to submit to public censorship of “disinformation” which means the Russian perspective. Oh they’ll bust a few pedophiles and drug rings as well but it’s mainly about controlling yet another app that’s available in the west and sticking a knife in Russia’s back.
Here’s something interesting from Ars:
As Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted tonight, “A popular Russian channel says that Telegram is also used by Russian forces to communicate, and that if Western intelligence services gain access to it, they could obtain sensitive information about the Russian military.” https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/shocker-french-make-surprise-arrest-of-telegram-founder-at-paris-airport/
This once again shows the need for tech sovereignty among anti-imperialist nations. It’s not enough to use something that’s not directly controlled by the enemy because the enemy will find ways to pressure, blackmail, coerce those third parties into doing their bidding anyways. It’s important for these countries to have platforms safely headquartered within one of these other friend nations that are resistant to just one person being arrested, where even someone with extraordinary access wouldn’t be a threat because of security service involvement.
TG most likely was already compromised long ago. Its based in UAE, a regime subject to USA influence, and probably already has backdoors and/or NSA monitoring. Founder is probably some sort of Westaboo or lolbert.
Most of TG is not encrypted anyway and is no more private than Twitter which many users had previously been on. I note they recently added E2E encryption for some “Secret chats”, but keep in mind that metadata cannot be encrypted. If it is true that Russia’s military is using it, they are very foolish to do so.
On the censorship thing, apparently they have already banned many groups after threats of legal action.
It’s doubtful it’s an official practice for field communications so much as soldiers using it on their own in ways that severely compromise operational security. It’s incredibly popular in Russia, much of the news we get on the Ukraine conflict is via official releases done on Telegram or Twitter by Russian state agencies.
That said maybe they’re using it in some semi-official capacity which is bad but at the same time this war kind of came out of nowhere. Russia doesn’t really have a lot of homegrown messaging apps. They can’t trust western stuff like Zuckerbook or Signal for obvious reasons and that leaves out most of the encrypted messaging clients. They could have rolled their own but that’s a vulnerability as any brand new and rushed software you create is more likely to have bugs that intelligence agencies from the west can exploit to take over devices, spy, break encryption, etc than something that’s at least been on the market a while. It does underline they /should/ develop something that can be used for these purposes that they control.