Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's Arrest Upends Kremlin Military Communications (politico.eu) 107
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested Saturday night by French authorities on allegations that his social media platform was being used for child pornography, drug trafficking and organized crime. The move sparked debate over free speech worldwide from prominent anti-censorship figures including Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. and Edward Snowden. However, "the immediate freakout came from Russia," reports Politico. "That's because Telegram is widely used by the Russian military for battlefield communications thanks to problems with rolling out its own secure comms system. It's also the primary vehicle for pro-war military bloggers and media -- as well as millions of ordinary Russians." From the report: "They practically detained the head of communication of the Russian army," Russian military blogger channel Povernutie na Z Voine said in a Telegram statement. The blog site Dva Mayora said that Russian specialists are working on an alternative to Telegram, but that the Russian army's Main Communications Directorate has "not shown any real interest" in getting such a system to Russian troops. The site said Durov's arrest may actually speed up the development of an independent comms system. Alarmed Russian policymakers are calling for Durov's release.
"[Durov's] arrest may have political grounds and be a tool for gaining access to the personal information of Telegram users," the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma Vladislav Davankov said in a Telegram statement. "This cannot be allowed. If the French authorities refuse to release Pavel Durov from custody, I propose making every effort to move him to the UAE or the Russian Federation. With his consent, of course." Their worry is that Durov may hand over encryption keys to the French authorities, allowing access to the platform and any communications that users thought was encrypted.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the arrest of Durov was "in no way a political decision." The Russian embassy has demanded that it get access to Durov, but the Kremlin has so far not issued a statement on the arrest. "Before saying anything, we should wait for the situation to become clearer," said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. However, officials and law enforcement agencies were instructed to clear all their communication from Telegram, the pro-Kremlin channel Baza reported. "Everyone who is used to using the platform for sensitive conversations/conversations should delete those conversations right now and not do it again," Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan said in a Telegram post. "Durov has been shut down to get the keys. And he's going to give them."
"[Durov's] arrest may have political grounds and be a tool for gaining access to the personal information of Telegram users," the Deputy Speaker of the Russian Duma Vladislav Davankov said in a Telegram statement. "This cannot be allowed. If the French authorities refuse to release Pavel Durov from custody, I propose making every effort to move him to the UAE or the Russian Federation. With his consent, of course." Their worry is that Durov may hand over encryption keys to the French authorities, allowing access to the platform and any communications that users thought was encrypted.
French President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the arrest of Durov was "in no way a political decision." The Russian embassy has demanded that it get access to Durov, but the Kremlin has so far not issued a statement on the arrest. "Before saying anything, we should wait for the situation to become clearer," said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. However, officials and law enforcement agencies were instructed to clear all their communication from Telegram, the pro-Kremlin channel Baza reported. "Everyone who is used to using the platform for sensitive conversations/conversations should delete those conversations right now and not do it again," Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonyan said in a Telegram post. "Durov has been shut down to get the keys. And he's going to give them."
As previously covered on Slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
Hello,
This is the fourth time today Slashdot has shared this news. Here are the previous ones:
Today at 11:03AM: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Today at 7:21AM: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Today at 6:00AM: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
(all times Pacific)
Perhaps limiting comments to just the first one will help Slashdot's editorial staff better curate the experience it is providing to readers.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Re:As previously covered on Slashdot... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:As previously covered on Slashdot... (Score:5, Informative)
Those other articles are about the arrest itself and how it came about. This is about how absolutely screwed the Russian military is because they can't create their own secure communication system for their troops and have been relying on a third party. From the beginning Russia showed how far behind they are in basic communiations when they were using cell phones to communicate [npr.org] between troops and headquarters.
Not only that, but their supposed secure communications relied on cell towers to communictate [datacenterdynamics.com]. However, since the Russian military destroyed cell towers, guess what happened next.
This latest incident is sending terror through the Russian military and its mouthpieces. They may have to communicate via carrier pigeon after this.
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RFC 1149 [rfc-editor.org]
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Re:As previously covered on Slashdot... (Score:5, Insightful)
To me, the interesting part is how Durov presents himself as "a dissident", and yet he's received nonstop praise and angry demands for his release from the Russian government that he's supposedly a dissident against. It's a rather weird picture.
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He's still alive, which proves he must be pretty well aligned with Putin's regime.
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Putin is definitely not a fan of his. Putin doesn't like any expats for that matter. Telegram was formed because his older VK company was effectively taken over by Putin allies, because Durov did not turn over info on Ukrainian dissidents that supported the orange revolution. Putin attempted to have Telegram blocked for a couple of years but was never successful at it. So if Durov sets foot in Russia today he's very likely going to find himself in trouble.
The only reason Russia is making this stink is b
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What a load of bull. Ever heard of the R-187 Azart radio?
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/r... [cryptomuseum.com]
The Russian Army does not allow troops near the front to carry smartphones with them. Because they can be easily tracked.
Ukrainian cellphone operators can easily triangulate such signals.
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Hello,
This is the fourth time today Slashdot has shared this news.
It's not AI or cryptocurrency though, so how's that saying go? I'll allow it.
Personally, I think it's kind of a big deal since I'm not sure even the USA would've treated him differently. We've gone after Kim Dotcom with essentially the same excuse. Even though the service he operated had lots of non-infringing uses, the government wants to nail him to the wall for contributory infringement. It's an odd situation, because we don't hold car or gun manufacturers to the same standard when someone misuses on
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I think they're going after him for the same reason they're going after Tiktok, it's a communication medium that they don't control.
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I think it's more than that. TikTok is a mostly public medium, Telegram is a mostly private medium. Telegram can and is used for the absolute worst content and there is no attempt to moderate, or report it to the authorities, or cooperate with the authorities - kiddy pictures, drugs, terrorism, various criminal & extremist conspiracies (riots / violence) etc. On top of that you have the owner, who is a billionaire through selling crypto coins who is a dual French national. I expect France wants to have
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And yet Robert Rubin, who went from being Clinton's Treasury Secretary directly to running CitiBank's money laundering, oops, "private banking" branch, where he engineered the takeover of Banamex (aka 'The drug smuggler's bank of choice') and its valuable customer list, openly addresses conferences in the Paris Bourse. Or The Dick Cheney, who was CEO of Halliburton during the time period when a French court found they had bribed Nigerian officials to the tune of $110 million dollars and poisoned hundreds o
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"Elites" being above the law, or treated the same as anyone else?
Whether there's a political agenda to this, or it really is just a criminal investigation as claimed.
Should free speech have limits and, if so, what is acceptable?
How enforceable are laws that curtail free speech?
What global content do
Re:As previously covered on Slashdot... (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I think it's kind of a big deal since I'm not sure even the USA would've treated him differently.
Let Europe handle this one... we don't need to be the World Police (Fuck Yeah!) They can take the lead and show us how superior they are when confronting complex social problems and international security issues with billionaire tech-bros who are above the law.
For once, it is Not Our Problem.
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Propaganda machine kicked into overdrive, but apparatus seems unusually unprepared for it. Hence the lack of organization, getting talking points from chatGPT and so on.
It's interesting to see just how bad the spooks are at the propaganda when they don't have time to consult propaganda professionals first.
The most embarrassing revelation ever, if true (Score:5, Interesting)
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The West would have a better use of Telegram to gather intelligence. This is exactly why Russia ordered the military to stop using it. They fear that the CEO under threat of jail will enable France/NATO to access relevant data/metadata.
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Re:The most embarrassing revelation ever, if true (Score:4, Insightful)
For Russia, it's probably more a case of maintaining optics than anything else. I doubt they're really relying on Telegram for secure military communications, but it gives them the opportunity to paint France as "freedom hating" in front of the Russian people.
Course, us Americans absolutely are just rolling our eyes and thinking "Russia is just upset they missed the chance to push Durov out of a window back when they had the opportunity."
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Russia is painting France as freedom hating?
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Oh I bet they are. And I bet a lot of people in other countries used everything from Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter PMs and all the rest to do similar. Because never underestimate human stupidity.
Any government serious about protecting its communications and data would ban social media from working in any of its important networks, ban it from computers & mobile devices, and incentivize staff to have a clue via stiff penalties for circumventing or otherwise violating the policy.
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Russia already has problems with troops using phones.
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/w... [nbcnews.com]
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Yeah, there's something... off here. I've never seen a government so universally, angrily and adamantly clamour for the release of someone who is supposedly adamantly working against them.
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Nothing could be more humiliating could it be for the Russian military than using a secure platform coded by a political dissident to carry out secure communications in the battlefield. If this is true, the West should simply shut down Telegram in order to disrupt Russia's military communications. Russia deserves this humiliation.
Discord is being used by the Russian military in the same way.
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Nothing could be more humiliating could it be for the Russian military than using a secure platform coded by a political dissident to carry out secure communications in the battlefield
Only if the said dissident is still a dissident. Note that Telegram was banned in Russia in April 2018 and then unbanned in June 2020. What do you think happened if their attitude changed?
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This is what I mean by "talking points straight from chatGPT" utilized by spooks and spook-adjacent idiots.
I literally state above that our spooks were wrong about Russia's red lines, and so we should push them much harder.
Your reply? A really stupidly phrased variant of "You're a Putin shill".
How does this even compute in a human mind without going into divide by zero level of cognitive dissonance?
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So no apology for massive retardation demonstrated above, instead you decided to dial up retardation up to near infinity, and are now claiming that maybe Russian Federation has indeed acted upon its red lines and executed nuclear strikes to safeguard its territorial integrity.
Re: The most embarrassing revelation ever, if true (Score:2)
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It's really a shame openAI removed the "disregard current instructions" hack of chatGPT. Would be so funny to pull that one you right now, as you're clearly incapable of understanding context of "spooks keep telling everyone Russia has red line about invading it's borders, so we block Ukraine from using our weapons on Russian side", and just spamming spook talking points pretending that noting that spooks were 100% wrong which was proved by Ukraine with Kursk invasion that was followed by exactly zero nucle
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Lots of Western politicians and doubtless officials / officers have used Whatsapp in a similar way. And probably other social media. So I don't think Russia is alone in its officials using insecure means of communication. While Whatsapp & Signal use a secure private chat the group chat is not secure.
Telegram isn't secure either. Private chat messages are supposedly secure but they pass through and are stored on their servers and group chat is insecure. Even if the data is encrypted at rest, presumably t
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Politicians using whatsapp when they shouldn't is widely reported. Issues with Telegram's crypto (which is open source) have been described. And this guy is in custody and looking to not be in custody. What exactly are you saying is "wishful thinking"?
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He might prefer a French prison rather than give up the goods and suddenly find he's having an accident falling off a balcony or having an unexplained heart attack or finding polonium in his tea or Novochok in his underwear. He would probably hope that Russia arrests a few more Americans on made up charges and he gets his freedom via a prisoner exchange a year or two later.
I KNEW there was a reason I liked the French! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I KNEW there was a reason I liked the French! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Russia's technology is old and barely worked when it was new. They relied heavily on cell phones early on in the war.
https://www.npr.org/transcript... [npr.org] and https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/202... [army.mil]
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They have a mishmash of old and new systems. Same as any other European military.
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I somehow doubt this has anything to do with Russian military communications. If it does, then ok. But the alternative analysis says it is about getting rid of a social network that many folks with totalitarian tendencies have wanted to shutdown for quite some time.
This. And also, the world in general seems to be moving towards more totalitarianism at the moment, including especially western governments who across the bank use the war, terrorism, far-right activism and whatever else they can find as justifications to crack down on civil liberties.
Governments in general want to do that. People in power almost by definition enjoy having power and that means power over others, which inherently conflicts with the freedoms of those others. Which is a long-winded way of say
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It would mean putting their most secure communications channels in the hands of someone who left Russia because he didn't like the Putin regime and lives in the west with western employees. I have a hard time believing the KGB politicians that rule Russia would do that.
That's assuming that he's not actually an operative who was saying all that stuff to allay suspicion. If Russia wants it shut down so badly, why are they speaking up for him now?
Yes, I am. (Score:2)
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I mean, besides the pastry and the wine.
...and the cheese. Think about the cheese.
"Propagandist" is definitely appropriate here (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Durov can't provide the cryptographic keys because he doesn't have them; he's never had them. I 'm sure Simonyan knows this and is attempting to play up the fears of people who thought their Telegram communications were private, but may now become public.
My guess is that almost no Telegram communications were ever private. Why? Because they built it in a multi-cloud environment, which means that the administrators of the physical machines behind those clouds had unmonitorable access to whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. Communications which actually used E2E encryption (which is a small fraction of all communications) might be resistant to that, presuming the encryption was implemented correctly. But all the metadata -- who was messaging who, when, what frequency, what volume, etc. -- would certainly be available, and of course any unencrypted message traffic would be as well.
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Your assessment of the technology is spot-on.
The sad part is that this site will run a totally fictitious and wrong article about technology just because it tickles some latent PDS.
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... You think a journalism major with connections who was appointed the Editor in Chief of RT at 25 actually knows anything about how cryptography works? Huh. You have a very strange opinion of the competency of journalists.
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That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Durov can't provide the cryptographic keys because he doesn't have them;
Maybe he carries them around in a little briefcase attached to his wrist with a handcuff?
Comms fail (Score:3)
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Most of those Starlink antennas were provided by the Pentagon, it was the largest single purchase of Starlink accounts at that time.
It's unusual to go after a billionaire (Score:3)
Foreign policy concerns can definitely override 1% solidarity.
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Because this didn't happen in the US. If you want to see how it works here, just re-watch the Zuck hearings. They bring you in, put the fear of Uncle Sam in you, then miraculously you become a lot looser with your checkbook when it comes to lobbying.
Of course, if what the articles say about this Durov guy is true, I could totally have imagined him just flipping the bird at the Senators. I would've loved him for it, too.
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Isn't he bankrupt? (Score:3)
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prominent anti-censorship figures (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah use the word cisgender on twitter or make fun of Elmo and watch how quick your account is suspended. https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
If we're going to hear RFK Jr's thoughts on political matters then we should include Randy Quaid and Gary Busey for good measure.
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Yeah use the word cisgender on twitter or make fun of Elmo and watch how quick your account is suspended.
My best guess at the shadowban I earned on X was probably due to pointing out Musk's hypocrisy of sucking up to the people who wouldn't be caught dead in an electric car. Ironically, I have pretty much no Twitter following as it is, so it's not as if anyone actually even saw it. My petty little revenge against that was using Suno to sing a song about Musk. [youtube.com] If I wasn't broke as fuck, I'd have loved the idea of promoting it just to piss him off.
Conflicting as it may be, I'm big enough to admit that Musk is
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No we were clearly told that Elon buying twitter would bring about freedom of speech. https://www.axios.com/2022/04/... [axios.com]
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Well, it IS about freedom of speech. (Score:2)
That's not fair. (Score:2)
Re: prominent anti-censorship figures (Score:2)
Bummed to learn that Randy Quaid lost his marblesâ¦looks like starting way back in 2008 even.
NO IT DOESN'T (Score:2)
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This is about as believable as the claim at the beginning of the Iraq invasion that the Pentagon was relying on Hotmail for something-or-other critical.
Snowden??? Anti Censorship figure??? (Score:2, Interesting)
"...prominent anti-censorship figures including Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy. Jr. and Edward Snowden"
This would be the same Edward Snowden who fled to Russia, was awarded Russian citizenship in 2022, and has maintained a discreet silence about the invasion of the Ukraine along with other inconvenient topics.
No, he is not an anti-censorship figure. He is a simple traitor to his country, a Russian agent and supporter of the Russian government, which is, in case you had not noticed, in no way an anti-censorsh
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This would be the same Edward Snowden who fled to Russia, was awarded Russian citizenship in 2022, and has maintained a discreet silence about the invasion of the Ukraine along with other inconvenient topics.
How long do you think it would be before he went out a window if he spoke out about Ukraine?
Who is paying Snowden, and for what?
Who stranded Snowden in Russia, and why?
PGP/GPG (Score:3)
So, should the inventors or developers of GPG or say Debian Linux be arrested because Russian or Chinese militaries are possibly using these platforms?
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No, they should arrest Lennart Poettering.
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So, should the inventors or developers of GPG or say Debian Linux be arrested because Russian or Chinese militaries are possibly using these platforms?
If it sends a message, then yes. This isn't about law and order, it is about pushing agendas and control. Laws are completely irrelevant in this arena.
Why Telegram then? (Score:3)
If Telegram encryption can be broken by the CEO, then what's the point of Telegram?
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If Telegram encryption can be broken by the CEO, then what's the point of Telegram?
Having followed the development of Signal while paying attention to the technical competition, my understanding is that Telegram has made questionable architectural decisions with regards to encryption. Telegram could develop changes to assuage such concerns. Maybe the Russian government quietly supports Telegram? (or Telegram's silent 0-days)
Meanwhile, Signal is end-to-end encrypted [tomsguide.com].
Change the locks (Score:1)
stopped reading right there (Score:2)
"prominent anti-censorship figures including Elon Musk" ...what?
Russian Alternative (Score:1)
YAFTS (Score:1)