cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/private/p/1471349/heres-what-telegram-giving-data-to-the-u-s-government-looks-like
Source: Legal Document.
The case this document surfaced in centers around Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub Al-Muhtadi, who allegedly participated in the October 7 attacks against Israel.
Lol
Telegram (also known as Telegram Messenger) is a Russian-Emirati … instant messaging (IM) service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)
Enough said. Anyone who uses this service is a tool of the lowest level. I’ve had better screwdrivers.
That’s a hell of a combo for fucking other people’s countries up.
Eastern Europe and North Africa are in absolute tatters because of those two.
thats cool
I’m still not going to use a platform with a closed source back end.
From a purely opsec standpoint, it doesn’t really matter whether the backend is open source or not. Either way you can’t know what kind of data is being shared and whether metadata is being deleted or not. What actually matters is that the client is open source and thoroughly reviewed by independent 3rd parties. With a good messaging app, it shouldn’t matter what runs on the server. And it is known that Telegram’s client uses some weird in-house crypto and doesn’t encrypt chats by default.
This is why I’m not going to ditch Threema, even though its backend isn’t open source. I think they have a solid business model, which is why I support them. I still prefer Signal though.
Open source means you can audit how the application transfers data. Of course you can’t audit parts of infrastructure and data retention, but you would be able to know if they’re using an outdated dependency or if they’re not using a good encryption algorithm if they’re running an open source project.
Yes, but open backend means you can self host
Especially from a US company like telegram?
So that’s all they had on him? Or all the gov asked for?
I will have to re-visit telegrams privacy policy at some point, but aren’t they known for storing quite a lot of info (at least when compared to other private messengers like Signal?)
That’s all they are willing to share publicly. They could easily extract any normal 1:1 chat history, etc. Normal chats aren’t end-to-end encrypted.
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