But here's the thing. If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable. You run a carrier service. Much like the owner of omegle found out, yes you do have a duty of care. You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit. You live in fairytale land if you think you can.
I upvoted your comment so that it has a bit of visibility because I know some people think this, but I disagree with it, very strongly.
First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.
Second, you propose your preferred moral economy as one that only curtails harms. In fact, you create another harm implementing what you think is right.
Reasonable people disagree about which is worse -- the creation and public support of a technocratic oligarchy in control of how humans communicate or the proliferation of some harms that take advantage of unfettered communication. But please don't be simple minded, pretending to yourself or others that there aren't real costs, social and physical, on both sides of this.
For myself, I think private communications are a human right and a massive good for society, and I don't condone criminal acts undertaken using messaging.
Indeed. NIMBYs in my area claim that we should shut down the train because criminals come from the inter city to commit crimes and then return to the city after. I see the claims against telegram to be the same.
That's not comparable, because there's an actual police service meant to take care of criminal activity, meaning that's the train is not a careless conduit with rampant unchecked lawless activity. And that's ignoring that NIMBYs just make up stuff and exaggerate, but even assuming their rampant fears were based in reality.
>First, your analogy is broken -- roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.
and they're usually public property and policed. Routine police inspection on a road and in particular control of borders and key nodes in your transportation infrastructure isn't exactly controversial. (unless you're part of some extreme political faction). You know a lot of countries where people can drive without a license plate?
Private communication is important but it has always had limits, this crypto mentality of companies exercising no compliance, having no borders, ignoring the law and national security doesn't have a precedent. Historically people communicated say in the US using an American telecommunications network which without a doubt complied with legal requests. It's not at all self evident that we should tolerate telecoms infrastructure operated by a Russian out of Dubai that is primarily used by an enemy we're effectively at war with.
That's because they are different, police can come with a warrant to check your house for illegal activity but they can't monitor you remotely 24/7 with barely any human intervention and store everything you do indefinitely. With electronic communication you either get full privacy or none.
And no, putting company's in charge of your privacy isn't a solution, if they can be compelled to give away your communication history then they'll abuse it. Have you not learned anything from the Snowden leaks?
Police got a warrant for Durov and arrested him. How is that different? Yet some people are upset anyways.
And it's not true that with electronic communication you either get full privacy or none. You can have end-to-end encrypted messages with unencrypted metadata, so that when police observe a message implicating the sender in a crime (e.g. on an arrested suspect's phone) they can get a search warrant for the IP address or phone number associated with that account and then visit the owner in person to look at the messages on their phone. This doesn't allow police to read everyone's messages all the time undetected, but does allow them to read specific people's messages if they get a warrant.
Since Telegram doesn't only have unencrypted metadata but also plenty of unencrypted messages, there must've been many cases where a search warrant would've yielded lots of useful information. If Telegram didn't properly respond to all warrants, it seems fair to launch an investigation.
According to the Telegram FAQ (https://www.telegram.org/faq#q-do-you-process-data-requests) data on their servers is encrypted and the keys are split and stored in different jurisdictions (and different from the jurisdiction where the data is stored).
With such a setup what does it mean to comply with warrants? Are we saying that Telegram should voluntarily yield all information regardless of jurisdiction?
Ah, this multi-jurisdiction setup explains why Durov himself was targeted. As the presumed controlling entity behind that network of shell companies, serving him with a warrant seems like the most effective legal means to make Telegram comply.
There are entire Telegram groups devoted to publishing CSAM. They're publicly available, not E2E encrypted. Being there in such a channel puts the data on your device, unencrypted. You can report it all you want. Nothing happens. Been there, done it.
It is not just that. Weapons. Drugs. Terrorism [1]. Pornography depicting rape.
[1] Includes accelerationism. France just had a terrorist attack on a synagogue. Germany had one on a city festival. Could be related to either. We don't know!
And yet, with all above being said, as much of a cesspool Telegram is, I much rather have such centralized there than in an application with group E2E encryption. But even then, every once in a while you want to scare the herd to demotivate their (criminal) effort, just be careful not to flock them to a better alternative. Which is a real risk.
I think private communications are a human right as well. But I don’t think every conceivable way of communicating must be private. You can always go outside and talk privately with your neighbour.
To use your analogy: shouldn’t everyone look away when you drive by so that you can have private road usage?
There is tinted windows for that. I agree that not everything is private. But if two or more parties want to be able to communicate privately it most certainly shouldn't be the government making that impossible. It would be like mandating everyone must wear their state issued camera and microphone.
Why stop there? By your logic, the owners of every ISP that provides a pathway for those criminal bits also should be in jail. Every single organization in that pathway would be liable from the registrars to the developers of web libraries or other app services. The governments themselves would be liable in many cases where the government has nationalized internet services.
There is a principle in the free world that one is not criminally liable for the speech of others. This is the principle that allows ISP's, newspapers, web forums, Google, etc. etc. to exist. You demand that the principle be violated and the Internet be destroyed. I disagree.
Because we want to, and we can. I don't get how HN consistently fails to understand the actual social and political process by which regulations are made. I constantly see this argument which effectively boils down to "if you ban a thing, you will also need to ban everything else, which is absurd, so you shouldn't ban anything". But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.
It is open to society to decide that Telegram is more proximate to the harm being caused, and less otherwise socially useful, than an ISP, and on that basis punish the former but not the latter. (It is also reasonable to argue that Telegram is not sufficiently proximate to the harm and that it is sufficiently socially useful that it should be allowed to operate, and honestly I sympathise with that argument more. But my point is that it is a matter of weighing social harm vs benefit and not just a technical analysis of "where the bits go".)
If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Arguing "ah, but by that logic you'll also have to jail the guy who sold the robber his breakfast" isn't going to cut it, and rightly so.
Because 'we' want to. Who is this 'we' you are speaking about? Globalist authoritarian elite that you are somehow part of? Democratic voters? Communication application users? Whose this 'we'?
Well in Telegram's case the idea is that they knowingly provide taxi services to those criminals and do supposedly nothing when it's reported to them because they are "too small" to moderate everything
How do they "knowingly" service criminals ? Is there a check box to state that you are a criminal when you message someone ? I just installed Telegram and can't find it.
If we start weighing "social harm vs benefit" and not "where the bits go" - we quickly come to the Third Reich and "social harm vs benefit" of the Jewish people.
> But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.
This is the principle behind, and popularize by, Nazism and Soviet-style communism. In short, it is the arbitrary use of force against whichever targets the ruling bureaucrats deem to be "socially harmful". This principle leads inevitably to mass murder and war, as history has shown repeatedly and without exception.
You seem to fantasize that you'll be in the in-group who gets to decide who is harmful. But then one day it will be you who is considered harmful. And the state will sacrifice your life for the "benefit of society".
It is the principle behind all government. In fact it is not much more than a basic description of the concept of a government. Your government bans stuff too, I guarantee it.
No fantasies here, the state does plenty that I disagree with. But the idea that societies can regulate harmful conduct is not really that controversial outside of HN and a few other particularly libertarian bits of the internet.
It's certainly the principle behind most governments. But not all. The one shining exception is the United States of America. That government was founded on an entirely different principle, the principle of individual rights. This principle says that man, due to his nature, has rights that no one else, not even his government, is allowed to violate. These rights are not granted and revoked by government, but protected by it. And if the government violates those rights in a significant way, it is a person's duty to overthrow that government. This was a truly radical position in 1776. Unfortunately, it is still radical today, and little understood.
If you'd like to learn more about this, google the "Declaration of Independence" or "The Rights of Man" by the philosopher John Locke.
> That government was founded on an entirely different principle, the principle of individual rights. This principle says that man, due to his nature, has rights that no one else, not even his government, is allowed to violate.
That's far from a uniquely US principle. See, for example, the European Declaration of Human Rights.
The US places more emphasis on individual rights over the rights of the community, which is its prerogative, but the US is an outlier; most liberal democracies accept a little more restriction on individual rights for the good of the community.
You can argue it either way, but a lot of US commentators seem to get outraged that other countries might have a different viewpoint.
> Why stop there? By your logic, the owners of every ISP that provides a pathway for those criminal bits also should be in jail.
No, that is by your own logic, not GPs. GP clearly said: "You can't just provide a service that knowingly provides a platform to criminal activity and do jack shit.". Considering that ISPs do something about that activity, by GPs logic, owners of ISP should not be in jail. Am I worng?
Yes, you are wrong. Let me explain. GP laid out his principle above: "If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers. You are liable."
He doesn't say that doing "jack shit" (not exactly a fleshed out legal term) will remove that liability, as you are suggesting.
There are other ways to capture and ensnare criminals. Sacrificing our privacy for the "greater good" is a bridge too far.
As one counter point, think about all of the completely fine human behaviors that instantly become kompromat when the powers have access to your every communication. That is way more dangerous to democracy, freedom, and liberty than a slightly smaller chance of "not protecting the children".
Besides, if we actually cared so much about children, we wouldn't let them not get school lunches, we wouldn't sell them on gambling and gacha games, and we'd do a much better job of educating them.
*sigh* Dude, if it's really that relevant and compelling at least quote it properly. It's 2024, finding and copy-pasting is barely slower than typing a bad paraphrase.
> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
-- A committee which included Benjamin Franklin
_____________
That said, this quote is typically misused, or at best being used wayyy outside its original context. [0]
The Penn family, the local semi-nobility of Pennsylvania, are offering the government a one-time "donation"... in exchange for getting a perpetual exemption from all taxes.
A committee of elected representatives--among them Franklin--are strongly opposed to it, since they believe the democratic legislature's "essential Liberty" to impose taxes for its citizens is way more important than any "temporary Safety" of a one-time lump sum.
And the key words in this quote are not Liberty and Safety even though they are capitalized - they are "essential" and "a little temporary". As long as these key words remain, the quote can be about anything:
Those who would give up essential Long-Term Economic Stability, to purchase a little temporary Shareholder Profits, deserve neither Long-Term Economic Stability nor Shareholder Profits.
Those who would give up essential Vendor Independence, to purchase a little temporary High-Resolution Retina Display, deserve neither Vendor Independence nor High-Resolution Retina Display.
Those who would give up essential Safety, to purchase a little temporary Liberty, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Those who would give up essential Refrigerator, to purchase a little temporary Stockpile of Peanut Butter, deserve neither Refrigerator nor Stockpile of Peanut Butter.
Not only you're responding with an ad-hominem, which is blatantly bad enough; but you're doing it against Benjamin Franklin? One of the most influential thinkers of his time who has contributed to the liberty of way more people than you ever will?
And I have no idea what you think you're adding to the discussion by adding this 'context'.
That phrase has a life of its own, and has stood the test of time.
When someone says that e=mc2, do you feel a need to make sure everyone knows the 'context' that Einstein took credit for some of his wife's work?
When someone quotes Gandhi to say "Be the change that you wish to see in the world", do you talk about him sleeping in a bed with his niece?
By the way, if you live in the West then your comfortable lifestyle is based on the work of slaves of various degrees. From forced prison laborers in America to cobalt and lithium miners in Africa, to actual full-on slave markets in Libya because tptb didn't like how un-exploitable the country was getting. We're all hypocrites, and pointing that out when it's not relevant just derails discussion.
Btw, Ben Franklin became an abolitionist later in life. He was elected as the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery around 1785.
Perhaps, but Telegram is not really a E2EE chat app, but rather a social media. Like 90% of Telegram use (at least in my circles) is channels which are not E2EE on Telegram.
This arrest is not about E2EE.
The arrest is about how much responsibility social media platforms have about the content posted on them.
There is no good answers to that question, and the debate of topic online is utterly useless.
Well I mean in many countries, blocking the surveillance agency from listening in on your calls/texts/chats is illegal. So making an app that interferes with the agencies ability to "listen in" is infact a criminal enterprise.
How about adding "illegal thoughts" to that mix too. It is only one short step away from wearing a monitoring "headband". All subversion grows its first root in the mind of the citizen. Nipping this in the bud through detection and re-education guarantees peace and safety of society and the nation. If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.
The Telegram fanatics for some reason are unwilling to hear it but we'll say it again: the reason why we still have an Internet in 2024 is that all those services at least attempt some form of moderation.
With more or less success, sure, but they can at least say there is an attempt and they do take down stuff. Durov pretty much brags about not doing the bare minimum.
Telegram allows to report illegal content to moderators. Jail those who saw the content but didn't report it.
I am sure all those claims in the media about "cooperating with terrorists" is just a lie. Probably it is something related to not implementing fingerprints for copyrighted material.
Or Telegram is threat for current establishilment because of platform used for organising protests. It could be politically oriented like main purpose of DSA.
No because those platforms make the values token effort to curb illegal activity via moderation be it user performed or done by their own employees. Telegram does not do this. Anywhere at all. It's very different.
I know chat rooms that have been nuked for Pornography etc. I reported some chats where I've seen inappropriate content and I received notifications that they were deleted. A lot of users are muted/banned too for illegal activities. It isn't exactly unmoderated, but the staff can't exactly search every single server under the sun for illegal material or activities. You probably don't know how bad Matrix is, out of 200k servers, 70k were banned for CSAM and there are still a lot of them around.
Last time I used Telegram and had a look at the "discussions around your area" or something, I couldn't find anything that wasn't about selling drugs or fake documents. It was a giant drug delivery platform.
It might be different in other places but here, in a large city of continental Europe, Telegram is definitely little more than an enabler for illegal activities.
Well, it really tells you haven't tried buying drugs on Telegram. It is all scammers, every single one of them (maybe with the exception for prostitutes but I bet most of these are scam too). There is pretty much 0% chance you'll buy drugs or fake documents using the geo search. They will scam you for a transfer and disappear. It really is no that different from a spam email, just different media and targeting.
That said, you CAN buy drugs on Telegram, sure, it is just not as easy as everyone seems to think. You need to know the account name of a service that delivers in your area, you need to be reeealy careful when typing the account name because for every real drug seller account there are multiple fakes with slight variation in the name that fish for people using search, and then even if you have a verified account and they sold you drugs last month, there is like 30% chance that the account have been compromised and now you are talking with scammers again.
Note that selling drugs is a victimless crime. Also, you could report those illegal posts, or you knowingly and willingly allowed criminals to continue their activities?
> If your app is known to be uses heavily by criminals ranging from Pedo's to drug dealers.
What about toilet paper? It's used by quite some criminals (not all that said: many criminals have very poor hygiene and just put their undies back on without wiping after number two).
Should we arrest people manufacturing toilet paper?
Anyway we all know it's not about criminals: it's about controlling speech so that protests as in Barcelona, the UK (where people who are denouncing rapes and killings are put in jail, while the actual rapists get very light sentences like only six months in jail), etc. cannot organize themselves.
It's about controlling the narrative.
And they're using useful idiots resorting to broken logic to push their totalitarian agenda.
Well much like the owner of omegle found out you can't provide platforms for criminal activities and make no effort to curb it. It only takes a 30 second google before you find telegram rooms offering all kinds of illegal stuff. You don't find that on Twitter. Twitter is atleast mildly moderated. Telegram could have moderation built in to catch illegal activities but it chooses to do nothing. See the difference?
The fun fact is that while Telegram won't make use of something akin to PicDNA to automatically detect CSAM, it will very happily take down your channel or group if you distribute copyrighted material.
They do know how to respond to copyright complaints. Not so much about other, far more serious sort of illegal activities. Just on that point, they should have expected something to be done against them.
Telegram is end-to-end encrypted in private chats, the Telegram team doesn't even know what people are discussing. Same should happen with Whatsapp or Signal. Should Whatsapp or Signal be accountable for what terrorists talk in private?
App can have internal keyword check that could open backdoor to law enforcement when certain terms are said. *fbi enters the conversation* probably won't be in your chat log anytime soon but you can't argue telegram, signal and whatsapp can't do it. Whatsapp being fbs darling almost certainly does already and signal servers anti spam folder is smelling mighty like a five eyes backdoor.
Tbh given both those apps company's have dealings with gov in aus I'm gonna say signals probably already got a backdoor into em. If you don't think so you don't know aus law well enough or who signals are.
Also the owners of the apps aren't liable for the content of the conversations. Their liable for providing a platform for the conversation to take place and for not knowingly taking available efforts to curb criminal activity on that platfor/service. It's like hey I'm gonna rent you a store house to hide all your illegal drugs in Mr gang member. I'm not doing the hiding or anything but I'm assisting the activity by providing the store house. I could make efforts to curb such activity like you know doing a rental inspection once every six months but I choose not to and turn a blind eye. Am I assisting a crime or am I completely innocent? Now repeat this but telegram is the store house.
Telegram has an open-source client and is moving to verifiable builds (not on every platform). You cannot hide such a backdoor, and users would be able to recompile a clean version of the app.
> "Thierry Breton, the French commissioner, had posted the warning letter on X, the platform owned by Musk, hours before the billionaire interviewed US presidential candidate Donald Trump, also on X."
> "On Tuesday the European Commission denied Breton had approval from its president Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter."
Ursula von der Leyen is not the Queen of the EU, no matter how much she'd like to be. Other people have the authority to speak and act officially without checking with her. That doesn't make their statements any less official, nor would her endorsement make them any more official.
>The fact that it was wound back by the head of the EU's executive branch - Breton's boss - demoted the statement to "the opinion of the commissioner".
I don't remember anything about "the opinion of the commissioner" in the letter, but there was huge "eu commission" sign right on the top. So the letter went as complitly "official" position of commission.
The contents of the letter are within his brief, but the timing of it was done in such a way as to impact the EU's foreign policy, which lies outside of his remit.
