Telegram Ban Is Forcing Ordinary Russians to Break the Law

Russia’s ban on the secure messaging app Telegram hasn’t exactly been met with unquestioning obedience and support. According to the Moscow Times (April 24, 2018) The Telegram Ban Is Forcing Ordinary Russians to Break the Law.   

State banking giant Sberbank sent its employees instructions on how to get around the blocking of Telegram (the bank currently uses the service for its corporate communications). Deputy Telecom and Communications Minister Alexei Volin, a state official, no less, hinted at how to bypass the ban, and admitted that he himself uses a VPN to do so.

Instructions on circumventing the block even appeared on the website of Rossia, a state-run television channel, though the material was quickly deleted. Many other state officials and parliamentary deputies have refrained from publicly expressing their disapproval, but have admitted in private conversations to having installed a VPN to continue using the service.

If communication via the messenger can’t be monitored, it must be banned, Roskomnadzor argued, and started blocking IP addresses linked to Telegram on April 16. As a rule, Russians have greeted bans by the authorities with approval or indifference. But with Telegram, everything has changed. Unlike in previous cases, this time a significant proportion of Russian society that was previously far from opposition-minded is willfully refusing to obey the new ban.

--
When governments ban those things that large portions of the population want, and more importantly when government ban those things to which people have a right - such as freedom of speech and privacy in personal communications - the people will find a way to obtain those things in violation of the government bans.  This creates an "outlaw culture" where people begin to disregard the authority of government in general.

Should Telegram provide encryption / decryption keys to the Russian government so that it can read the communications of anyone using Telegram? The Russian courts have ruled that it must, but is doing so the right thing to do? Probably not! Should the Russian government in an attempt to ban Telegram disrupt several other Internet services? Absolutely not!