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Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France
(www.tf1info.fr)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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What a fucking horseshit excuse for law enforcement.
Encrypted communication should be a human right.
The issue I see with Telegram is that they retain a certain control over the content on their platform, as they have blocked channels in the past. That's unlike for example Signal, which only acts as a carrier for the encrypted data.
If they have control over what people are able to share via their platform, the relevant laws should apply, imho.
I agree but its not even an encrypted messenger. Almost no one uses the weak encryption and im pretty sure they offer decryption to governments considering they were threatened to be banned in russia and avoided it
What has encryption got to do with it?
Most of telegram is not encrypted. There are unencrypted channels on telegram right now hosting child pornography. Telegram never removes them.
Good. They shouldn't.
Unencrypted channels are the ones that are easiest to trace, and the easiest ones to successfully base a prosecution on.
The most correct response is to report them to law enforcement. Unencrypted channels make amazingly effective honeypots. It's fairly easy to bust people using unencrypted channels, esp. because people think they're anonymous and safe. It's much, much harder to bust people once they move to .onion sites and the real dark net away from their phone. When you shut down all the easy channels, you push people into areas where it's much harder, almost impossible, to root them out.
Look, if you're going to knowingly host child porn, and not take it down even after you have been made aware, you get what's coming to you.
The idea that Telegram would somehow better serve their customers by staging law enforcement stings in unencrypted channels is completely divorced from Telegram's core mission.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or the right to encrypt. Child Pornography is a criminal matter. Failure to cooperate with law enforcement while providing comms and distribution to child pornographers is going to land you in deep shit eventually.
What if telegram refuses to cooperate with law enforcement in a timely fashion to provide details of the people sharing that material? What should law enforcement do then?
At that point they’re willingly hosting it for no reason other than to host it for their customers and they’re complicit, no?
I think that holding the executives and BoD in criminal contempt of court is a good place to start.
EDIT: AFAIK Telegram doesn't use warrant canaries.
Telegram and VK are both CSAM cesspits. Most of Russian social media has this problem, but VK and Telegram are where you'll end up exposed to shit just by browsing.
So shut down the internet.. FOR THE CHILDREN
No. You can say that about so many laws being made, but telegram simply hosts the most vile shit.
So you’re saying we should shut down any service that allows encrypted communication? Because any service that offers encrypted communication is going to be enticing to someone who commits crimes.
No, we should shut down any service that refuses to take action against its users when presented with proof that they are distributing child porn.
Encryption only offers so much plausible deniability. Once law enforcement gains access to one of these channels, they have proof of what's going on, and the content is all hosted by Telegram. When Telegram refuses to cooperate and remove this content, they become complicit in distributing it.
Encryption isn't an excuse to violate the law. If Telegram's policy is not to remove CSAM, then they are a criminal organization.
We should shut down any organization that doesn’t cooperate with police when people are breaking laws or just the laws you want them to help enforce?
No, that's not what the person is saying in the slightest. Just read their comment again, it's actually very clear.
Creating a Telegram Channel to help underage victims of rape in Idaho get abortions out of state without their parent’s consent is also a crime. Would you want to shut them down for allowing those groups?
If Telegram is indeed knowledgeable of specific groups distributing CSAM, goes into that group and views the material to confirm, and still does nothing about it, then yes… that’s pretty terrible. However, it’s law enforcement’s responsibility to find those people and arrest them. If Telegram is shut down, there will always be another method. TOR, popup forums, file sharing sites like MEGA.
What I’m saying is focusing on the communication method is like trying to kill a hydra.
Again: not what the person said. They said that if someone proves that you host CSAM, you should take it down.
That's... Not at all what I'm saying...
^ this comment right here law enforcement
Sounds like they meant that for chat GPT...
lol. Technically if they could answer it, they should be the one investigated
Are you honestly asking me to link you some child porn?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Well, those are the words you typed. You literally asked me to link you child porn. Hence a moderator deleted your comment.
You're disgusting.
Blocked.
My point was you were saying something existed for which you had no proof, nor is likely that you’ve ever witnessed it.
Yes, but... I mean, it is being used for all of that.
It doesn't matter in the slightest.
Making a tool that provides a private communication service literally everyone should have unrestricted access to does not make you an accomplice to anything.
So is the Internet, better go arrest my ISP.
The ISP will absolutely cooperate with law enforcement though, unlike telegram. That seems the nature of the issue in that there is a lack of moderation and oversight, which anonymity is not mutually-exclusive from flagging nefarious activities, ideally. I REALLY am not too keen on giving safe harbor to the likes of pedos and traffickers and what have you.
Secure communication between individuals is a fundamental right. That nefarious activities can be conducted over secure channels can never be justification for suspending that right.
I'm not sure I yet agree with that. People can have secure communications; that's called meeting in person and in a private room. That line gets blurred with intercontinental mass-communication that ultimately is beyond the use of the average citizen and is more frequently utilized to nefarious ends. If the damage outweighs the benefits to society, then clearly a rational limit perhaps should be considered.
Ultimately, what matters is respecting the house rules; and if the house rules of France were broken, why in the world would he travel there?
I reject the premise of your argument: secure communication is not more frequently used for nefarious purposes than non-nefarious purposes.
But even if I accepted that premise, I would still reject your argument. The underlying principle of your argument is misanthropy: humans are inherently evil. They will always choose evil, and therefore, they must never have an ability to effectively dissent from totalitarian control.
The dangers posed just by the French government greatly exceed the dangers posed by every single person who ever has or ever will "nefariously communicate" over every communications platform that has ever been or ever will be invented.
Yeah I haven't committed to one side or the other yet. For me it's less about misanthropy and more about transparency and accountability. The nature of the French democratic government means it is by extension held accountable to some albeit imperfect extent by the people. After all, the laws are by Transitive Property an extension of the people. But who holds accountable the sex trafficker that cannot be tracked? Conversely we can always say, "if you're doing nothing wrong, then why do you need to hide it?" An age-old dilemma. There probably should be a reasonable middle-ground between privacy and accountability.
The sex trafficker can absolutely be tracked by doing old-fashioned police work: you spend time, money and energy to infiltrate the network, gain their trust and eventually take them down. But this requires police funding and training.
It's not a dilemma, the answer has been given multiple times: under the rule of law, law enforcement has to prove (or at least demonstrate a strong suspiscion) that you're involved in illegal activities before they can intrude in your privacy.
But with the advent of mass data gathering and the exemple given by the NSA, all law enforcement agencies dream to change this paradigm.
That "old-fashioned police work" IS very often communications monitoring. I have no problem with you saying a search warrant should be necessary, after all. Focus on the breaches of trust by the government institution for which you have some level of oversight, as opposed to providing a safe harbor for all nefarious communication in blanket form. It is thus not unreasonable to have Telegram provide some semblance of moderation and oversight to filter out obviously-nefarious, illegal activities while permitting the rest to pass-through uninterrupted. Communication isn't wrong; demonstrably criminal communications, such as child sex trafficking communications, are. To think how many murders and sex-trafficking incidents were caught by the monitoring of communications following a warrant.
Let's instead focus on the transparent institutions moderating what is illegal to curb government overreach as opposed to providing a blanket safe-haven for mold to propagate. This is basically the Silk Road all over again, and for good reason that too was shut down.
Accountability is something a government owes to the people. It is not something the individual owes to the government or the public. It is not and should not be easy for the government to invade individual privacy.
What "accountability" do you owe when I falsely declare you to be a kiddy diddler? What "accountability" do you owe when the government is the one making the false accusation against you? I ask, and I answer: you owe nothing at all.
The government, when Democratic anyway, is a reflection of the people. Quite literally the etymological root of the word. We are fortunate to live in a time where when such a western democratic government does something wrong — particularly in France — the people can demand change by way of riot or vote. By extension, such laws were drafted in representation if not direct referendum by the people. In other words, the extension of this CEO getting arrested on France soil IS the will of the people. And if the will of the people demands a degree of security and resources to inhibit crime, then so be it.
I wonder to what extent encrypted communications permitted (or would've exacerbated) the likes of the Charlie Hebdo attack in France. I'm pretty sure 99.99999% of all communications the average citizen does not need to be secured beyond the capacity of a search warrant to reveal.
You're right, it should not be easy; but it should also not be impossible when necessary.
You're locking up a member of "we the people" not because he actually committed any offense against the people, but because he provided an essential service to the people, and you don't like how some entirely hypothetical person may or may not have used that service.
You are stripping a person of their political power and authority, on the basis that a larger group of people agree with your position. That is not democracy. That is "populism". It disgusts me that so many fail to understand the difference.
Populism is two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. Democracy is every measure taken to keep the sheep from appearing on that ballot.
No I am not locking up anybody.
A foreign national landed on the property of France, and is thus subject their laws forged in the blood of Democracy — and if you're going to enter the house of someone else, you better abide by their rules, yes? He was then arrested — not locked up in prison — in lieu of a legal warrant.
If you don't like the house rules, then don't go to France. Pretty simple.
Telegram seems to be failing in its duty to properly moderate communications on their platform that involve deeply fucked up shit, which you don't seem to care all that much about, curiously.
Telegram has no such duty.
Oh, I'm sorry. I don't want to give you the wrong impression. I do care. I care very much. I don't want to give you the impression that I "don't seem to care", because I absolutely do: I care very deeply about ensuring everyone has the ability to freely discuss all the "deeply fucked up shit" they want to. The more "fucked up" you think that shit is, the more the individuals discussing it should be protected from you.
Your accusatory use of the word "curiously" is exactly why I care so much. Go shove your vaguely menacing commentary up your piss hole.
That's for French courts to decide, not you or me. Their house; their rules.
From pedophilia to sex-trafficking, you care very deeply about protecting their rights to discuss and coordinate these things without oversight or traceability...?
... Alrighty then.
So yeah, okay, buddy — I venture a guess that you know, consciously or subconsciously, that your arguments are quickly crumbling by the accelerated rate of substituting substance with insults & deflections. Truly, a classical dead giveaway of rhetorical checkmate.
Yes. You're clearly not a student of Thomas Paine:
I'll note that your response is not a rebuttal. Secure communication is a fundamental right, regardless of what France thinks about it.
Remind me when Thomas Paine elects the leaders and writes the laws of France.
Yeah yeah yeah... And I'll even help by giving you another to add to your notebook:
- Benjamin Franklin
And yet, when the liberties of one are at the detriment of another's, therein lies when Government intervenes — no different than a parent settling a dispute between two children. As I said, private communication can exist: it's called speaking to an individual in a private room. The difference is that there are moments when warrants warrant an intervention or moderation thereof. So to say again, an intrusion on private conversation should not be easy, but it shouldn't be impossible when necessary either. Many Democratic nations seem to come to the same conclusion.
After all, "Secure communication is a fundamental right" isn't a fact; it is your opinion that has yet to be established, and is thus subjective if not arbitrary in scope and domain. Let's not put the cart before the horse and present a circular-reasoning fallacy whereby the premise itself has yet to be established.
Why? They happily hand all your data over to whoever asks and so does everyone else that’s why they can single them out because you’re already bought and paid for.
It is but so are phones and computers in general. Same with cars, many crimes require transportation.
As always, there's a lot of nuance which is lost on Lemmy users.
It's a question of exactly what telegram is being used for, what telegram the company can reasonably be aware of, what they've been asked to do, and what they've done.