WSJ Comments Highlight Telegram

An April 1, 2018 article in the Wall Street Journal highlighted Telegram as a communications application that can help safeguard users from surveillance and monitoring by law enforcement and abusive governments.

Part of the article stated:

Telegram is an example of a service offering users complete security. Encrypted from end to end, domiciled in a country out of reach of subpoenas - and very easy to use - the app is among the top choices of people worried about snooping governments and malicious third parties. Telegram’s reputation has been a double-edged sword.

Telegram is popular in countries like Iran, where it was instrumental in helping the population organize the wave of antigovernment protests that swept across the country in early January.
Mr. Watts, who previously worked as an FBI special agent on a counterterrorism task force, said law-enforcement agencies need to invest a lot more in human intelligence and undercover investigators to penetrate secure online spaces.

Some U.S. firms are already adapting to fears of new regulation and offering even greater security than Telegram. Signal, in San Francisco, is emerging as one of the more successful examples. It says it deletes all user information once it is no longer necessary for communication, making it impossible to comply with demands for users’ personal data.

That would make Signal more secure than, for example, WhatsApp, the popular encrypted messaging service, which Facebook bought in 2014 and that stores information such as with whom users are communicating and when.

"When we receive a subpoena for user data," Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike posted on the company’s website, we "have nothing to send back but a blank sheet of paper."

Observers warn the #deletefacebook movement will drive more users to these secure systems.
Telegram’s founder, the Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, said the firm recorded 200 million active users in March, a 70% increase on the year. "We don’t do deals with marketers, data miners or government agencies," he wrote in the post on Wednesday. "For us Telegram is an Idea: it is the idea that everyone on this planet has a right to be free."

Mr. Durov has relocated the company several times since leaving Russia, where it faces a court order to turn over encryption keys to the intelligence services. It is now based in the United Arab Emirates.

Telegram’s terms are simple: No calls to violence, porn or copyright infringement on public channels. The app can’t take action on private channels because all private content is encrypted and largely inaccessible even to the company.

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Daesh terrorists were reported to have used Telegram to communicate and plan attacks, which resulted in some bad press for the company. However, just because someone uses a tool to commit a crime does not mean that there is anything wrong with the tool itself.

Some evaluations of Telegram have also questioned its encryption algorithms and protocols, and a 2017 report in the Verge claimed that the app's encryption had been cracked by the Russian FSB.

That being said, I do like and use Telegram. It is a good platform for communicating and sharing data, and Telegram's strong privacy stance and its willingness to stand up to attempted government intrusions make it a favorite.