“Telegram is not a private messenger. There’s nothing private about it. It’s the opposite. It’s a cloud messenger where every message you’ve ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that Telegram the organization controls and has access to it”
“It’s like a Russian oligarch starting an unencrypted version of WhatsApp, a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. Somehow, they’ve done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives in Russia, and their families are there.”
" What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. So that’s in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone’s like, oh, France. But I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn’t have access to the data and couldn’t respond to that same request. To me it’s very obvious that Russia would’ve had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment"
how much data do the FBI get from telegram? do you think the russian owner (who got arrested in france for refusing to make changes demanded of him by glowing authorities) is very likely to give any of your info over to american 3 letter agencies?
I think it probably doesn’t matter what he wants, it only matters that the data exists at all. If the owner is not giving permission, that’s one thing. But I’m inclined to believe that those American 3-letter agencies aren’t the sort to ask permission.
All it takes is one disgruntled systems engineer who thinks they don’t get paid enough. An agency comes knocking with a sizable offer of cash, and they’ll get the backdoor they want.