[EGreg]

Actually, this is exactly what Pavel Durov (Mark Zuckerberg’s counterpart and founder of the Russian Facebook vkontakte) did when Russian authorities asked him to reveal who helped organize the Maidan protests in 2013/2014

https://globalvoices.org/2014/02/22/pro-maidan-video-goes-vi...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1146789-durov1

(Besides these guys I mean: https://www.ndi.org/eurasia/ukraine)

And he just posted the middle finger on his site.

Pretty soon he started receiving the standard “tax evader” treatment (i.e. offices being ransacked, veiled personal threats etc.), his shareholders pushed him out and he and his brother fled the country and started Telegram.

Pavel is a true libertarian who’s stood for his beliefs against his own government, and lost control of his company as a result. Unlike Moxie Marlinspike (founder of WhatsApp and also Signal) who claims he is an “anarchist”, Pavel walked the walk.

When he started Telegram, he pissed off his US investor who got heat for Telegram being used by ISIS to communicate. The investors were pissed off that they never made a profit on Telegram and was mentally associated with helping ISIS. Although Pavel eventually did take action: https://www.wsj.com/articles/telegram-app-tackles-islamic-st...

Pavel also claims his team was approached by the CIA multiple times and they successfully resisted it. Telegram offices are nowhere to be found in Dubai: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg8mWJUM7x4

That is how you run a free speech absolutist social network that governments all want to control. Telegram is probably the most secure and trusted centralized social network (with Signal a distant second).

But that is insane. We don’t have to trust Pavel or Moxie to be our “last line of defense.” Why do we rely on giant, centralized corporations to host all our private conversations?

This was my response to Moxie’s critique of Web3 and decentralization:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

[sgjohnson]

So why the fuck Telegram is not e2e encrypted by default, and why are group chats not e2e encrypted?

Not to mention that even when chats are e2e encrypted, they are encrypted using their proprietary algorithm?

[upofadown]

As mentioned in the linked article, E2EE group chats are more or less impractical due to the identity verification problem. This initiative is intended to help with that. I will also point out that large group chats are impractical due to the simple fact that not everyone will know everyone else. So someone can just leak the messages.

The Telegram method of dealing with this is obviously not the only way, but it is a legitimate way.

>Not to mention that even when chats are e2e encrypted, they are encrypted using their proprietary algorithm?

The algorithm is public. It is a straightforward application of well known primitives. It is hardly proprietary.

[robryk]

> The algorithm is public. It is a straightforward application of well known primitives. It is hardly proprietary.

Note that its predecessor, was very much not that (e.g. https://words.filippo.io/dispatches/telegram-ecdh/ was a vulnerability in it, and it stuck to some weird choices of crypto primitives/key sizes for a pretty long time). This colors my expectations about the current version slightly.

I personally know nothing about the current protocol used (mtproto 2.0) and a few minutes of googling surfaced https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/595.pdf, https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/469 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03141, which I'd need to read in reasonable amount of detail to have an opinion on mtproto 2.0.

[EGreg]

That’s like Mehdi Hassan nitpicking small factual inaccuracies in the Twitter filea last week and ignoring the main discussion with Matt Taibbi about government censorship around the world.

Look, if people want to encrypt their chats on Telegram, they start a secret chat. That’s how it should be. Why should it be the default? Because you think people are idiots?

If I make a secret chat on Telegram, I trust it more than a default chat on Signal. Both are good, but one company is much harder to pressure than another.

And this is all a moot point - like arguing which homeless person is richer. If you want real privacy and control — simply communicate without using the infrastructure and software provided by centralized corporations!

[robryk]

> Look, if people want to encrypt their chats on Telegram, they start a secret chat. That’s how it should be. Why should it be the default? Because you think people are idiots?

Because everyone is an idiot once in a while (just after waking up, when drunk, when stressed, when sick, ...). Also, because the very presence of a secret chat is something that can be observed and can be enough to raise suspicion.

[EGreg]

I know this is a bit of a cop-out but even writing in a non-secret chat and having Telegram know, then totally deleting a message on Telegram with no visual trace to the counterpart, is less worrying for me than doing the same on the “e2e encrypted” WhatsApp which shows “Message deleted” and if I failed to do it, prevents me from deleting the message after a while. Telegram lets me delete everyone’s messages and even the entire chat anytime. That shows where their head is at.

That said, you are right that not-on-by-default-for-everyone makes the encrypted chats more suspicious.

I have to say that I have a nuanced view on encryption, which isn’t matching the orthodoxy on HN:

https://community.qbix.com/t/balancing-privacy-and-accountab...

[robryk]

If I understand your proposed world correctly (I understand it as morally equivalent to the escrow of ~all keys with k-of-n split across some well-chosen entities/people), I expect a person holding that view to support encryption-by-default even more strongly, because in a world that looks that way (and that way actually works as described) there is no apparent downside to that. I'm curious whether you disagree with any part of this.

OT: Do you have anything more concrete written on the choice of holders of escrow shares (so that they can be trusted to actually follow the audit rules)?

[EGreg]

Thanks for reading through what I wrote and grokking it! It means a lot to me. Now we can discuss it.

Yes, for all private interactions / conversations I support encryption, provided it can be decrypted in the way I said. Obviously there is room for innovation to make it harder and harder to do bulk decryption without a proper reason and audit trail. And make sure somehow that the cameras can prove they aren’t sending unencrypted video or that encryption keys are secure. It’s hard to prove a negative, but possible if verifiers can search the entire signal. Those innovations are part technological and part societal… but the underlying technology (like blockchain) has to exist first. Has anyone built it yet?

Now having said that, I don’t think encryption keys should be that hard to get for conversations within a corporation, and probably should be nonexistent for public servants on duty. Today we have the opposite … NATO promises to Gorbachev are secret, Normandy format talks were closed for years, Ukraine-Russia negotiations were behind closed doors, we don’t know why they all failed. And regular people have to go to war because of their failure. I think if the government wants to know where my $600 goes I should be able to know where trillions go.