Comment by vld_chk
2 years ago
Telegram and Signal solves very different types of privacy issues.
Telegram is good, as you mention, to be relatively private in groups/chats/channels without a need to expose neither your phone nor even a nickname (unless you live in autocratic countries — will come to this later).
But it comes with costs. First, their p2p communication is not e2e encrypted by default. Not to say that all comments/group chats are not encrypted too, unlike let’s say WA.
Second, Telegram API. It gives too much information. You can do a lot with it: read history, track changes of usernames, etc. For example, it is quite easy to obtain an internal user ID and there are black market services and databases where they promise to connect that ID with phone number if that account ever had privacy settings switched off in the past.
Claimed that they kind of scrape all accounts and pair ID for those where privacy settings set poorly. Even if you change it later — your internal ID and that scrape will state forever.
Third, Telegram was funded by Russian government since Durov had issues with SEC. He raised money from different Russian state-owned banks like VTB, issued bonds which are traded in Saint-Petersburg stock exchange, and even take some money directly from Russian government though a Qatar proxy-company. Not to say, that there are cases when TG was involved in criminal charges against people (the most famous one is story with Ryanair plane being forced to land in Minsk to arrest Lukashenko’s critique) and it was never directly addressed and explained by company how exactly those people was caught and how company protect against “SIM card replacement” cases (Signal at least inform me everytime my peer logged to new device).
Selecting between Signal with AFAIK no known cases of charges in dictatorship countries like Russia, funded by non-profitable charity, and TG without default e2e encryption, public API and Russian-state funding, is quite obvious for me.
It was also banned and blocked in Russia for several years. It was only unbanned when they agreed to cooperate with security services.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia
More to this “lucky coincidence” it was unbanned exactly when Durov failed in trouble with SEC and raised Russian-state money to solve his problems. Around same time almost all official Russian institutions open TG accounts and Russian Parliament (if we can call that silly thing like this) representatives was saying like “we solved all problems with them”.
When war started, and Russia banned a lot of services like FB, they created list of communication platforms they have questions about loyalty and cooperation with Russian government. TG was not on that list and through the whole war the only issue was about Telegraph — supplementary platform to publish long notes. AFAIK there was 0 questions or criticisms to TG in those 2 years.
As for me, it says a lot
I didn't know a lot of this. I thought Telegram was mostly funded through Durov's Bitcoin and VK money? It feels strange that he'd be so "in bed" with the Russian govt when the whole reason he left was because of his staunch opposition to taking down Navalny's VK page. But I haven't done extensive reading on this.
Durov was indeed an opposition to Russian govt for some time and TG was banned in Russia for some time.
But then “SEC-incident” happened. He and his brother wanted to build TON and fund it by kind of ICO (without naming it ICO). SEC decides enough is enough and blocked launch of TON with charging Durov for selling unregistered securities.
At the end, issue was settled, Durov returned all money and settle the deal with SEC, but it shrinks his finance by a lot and he ran out of money for TG.
Then he was seen in Russia and issued bonds for $1 bln. According to Russian financial press [1], bonds were underwritten by Russian banks closely affiliated with government or directly stated-owned (all of them are in sanctions list now), and even some money was invested by Russian Fund of Direct Investments [2]. Last summer he again issued bonds for TG for $270 mln. You can buy TG bonds at SPB stock exchange where they were listed 2 weeks after the issuing [3].
Surprisingly (repeating my comment below), around same time, Russian govt withdrew all their claims to Telegram and started to use as the official communication channel.
Not to say that other “transformations” happened like Duriv publicly denounce US declaring it is a “police state” [4]
All links in Russian, sorry:
[1] https://www.rbc.ru/finances/15/03/2021/604f11019a79478034130... [2] https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-56501991.amp [3] https://www.forbes.ru/finansy-i-investicii/424665-shirokiy-k... [4] https://te.legra.ph/7-prichin-ne-pereezzhat-v-Kremnievuyu-do...
Durov personally blocked Navalny channels in Telegram during 2021 elections - https://www.rferl.org/a/telegram-navalny-smart-voting/314662... even though "technically" as a foreign legal entity they had no obligation to follow orders of Russian censorship agencies. Also, if you look up the results of court decisions in Russia, Telegram leads by a significant margin among other messengers. Yes, of course, it is the most popular messenger in Russia, but it is designed from the ground up to tie and control the circle of communication to specific people as precisely as possible.
Dictatorship exists in varous forms. Russia has democracy though in bad shape. There various flavours of democracy. But what about total dictatorship in China has no opposition and many countries with theocratic monarchy.
It's really easy to tell the difference between a democracy and a fake democracy. Democracies are messy, people never agree. Anywhere that get's consistent landslides for one person or party is not a democracy.
Take for example France vs Russia. In the 2022 election, Macron managed to get just ~30% of the voters that wanted him as President. In the second round where only two options remained, only 58%.
Without any serious opposition (with the murder of Boris Nemtsov and jailing/deregistration of Alexei Navalny), the 2018 was again a landslide for Putin with 76.69% of the vote.
There are of course other easy ways to tell, but this serves as a pretty easy heuristic.
This is, of course, a gross simplification, of everything that makes up a democracy. For example, the US is at best a flawed democracy because of all the lobbying, money and gerrymandering (and things like the Electoral College).
Disclaimer: Not American, I'm a Kiwi, so outsiders view of US politics.
Bullshit. Russia has no democracy, even in the minds of its citizens, not to say in the government. It never had and it may never have democracy. At least, until Russia exists in its current shape of form.
My bet is that they have a chance for democracy only when Russia becomes a set of little independent states. As Russia in a nutshell, is just a Muscovy that occupied other sovereign states. It was exactly like they’re trying it with Ukraine currently, again. Again, as the previous one was in 1918, when Russia ‘incorporated’ other states, what we know as ussr.
Russia had democracy back in the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s.
E.g. the Russian Comunist party leader Zyuganov have said many times that he lost the 1996 president elections in a fair way.
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