The official version is that Telegram was used by terrorists who blew up the metro in Saint Petersburg.
The real reason is more simple: it's mostly used by the small middle class, people working in tech and business. The current laws in Russia were used to block LinkedIn, but they didn't touch Facebook or Twitter — that would be too much.
It could be, but much more people use WhatsApp in Russia, people like my parents who haven't noticed any laws against the free internet before.
They don't touch Signal or anything else as well.
WhatsApp has lots of clients for the shitty phones poor people use and a ton of Russians use WhatsApp. It's also possible that some implementations of these WhatsApp apps or the phones that host them are hacked, while others are not so it could be less of a binary distinction than one might assume.
Telegram is widely popular among that part of the country who like doing illegal things; it was even endorsed by local darknet, they set up bots to help circumvent blocking and stuff like that. Really juicy target for banhammer compared to whatsapp that has a smaller and more legitimate user base (in russia).
Yes, I would like to know how that works since whatsapp is constantly being advertised as super secure because of using the signal protocol. Do Russians get a different version of the app?
Assuming they set up signal protocol correctly, which I'm sure they did since Open Whisper Systems partnered with WA to set it up right, they're likely just sharing details on users' contact lists.
Considering Facebook owns WhatsApp this isn't surprising, they're definitely happy to share this information (ever seen someone in your FB "suggested friends" list after messaging them on WA?)
If they had pushed a different version of the app to Russia or there was a way of breaking message encryption I'm sure someone would have noticed by now.
I think you can pretty easily guess from the #deletefacebook statement of the whatsapp founder that they did not implement the protocol "correctly".
Corporate statements about the security and privacy of their products usually leave open the possibility that they engage in lawful intercept. Even if they don't they can always just lie and use the fact that they have national security letters barring disclosure as legal cover if it ever comes out.
They could probably still use this "design feature" (that Signal doesn't have) to hack users who don't authenticate the people they're talking with (also authentication isn't enabled by default on WhatsApp, but it is on Signal):
If you're a user of WhatsApp, make sure you enable the two-factor authentication PIN, too, because otherwise it should be relatively trivial for your own government to gain access to your account by using your number with the local carrier's help (it's also possible to do it without the carrier's help, given how broken the security of carrier networks is). Many Telegram users were hacked this way by the government in Russia, too.
Whatsapp makes a local backup in internal storage everyday. There is no setting to disable this backup. There are many opportunities to access the chat history, specially for Facebook, that wouldn't require cheating with the signal protocol.
There is a formal process for that. First, a messenger must register with Roskomnadzor (a government organization). So if a messenger is not on the list, it doesn't have to share anything yet.
What i think about it: why not build in ToR client right into the app itself, make it update itself, then always use ToR with obfs4, and openly declare that there will be no compliance, and you can't do anything?
Only concern could be the file size, but Orbot is only 12MB for example.
It will also greatly increase popularity of the messenger.
Cause for them to use it overseas it needs to be unblocked internally (to Russia)? Russia can always "whitelist" some applications for government officials too. Or y'know not rely on third-parties and roll their own solution, not like Signal's protocol isn't open sourced.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make.
Blocking Telegram helps Russian intelligence operations by making it appear like as if the Russian government did not have access to the vast majority of conversations over Telegram.
The real reason is more simple: it's mostly used by the small middle class, people working in tech and business. The current laws in Russia were used to block LinkedIn, but they didn't touch Facebook or Twitter — that would be too much.