TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram
I would vaguely imagine that they aren’t going to be very happy about the Threadiverse when they discover us. There’s no global moderator team to make moderate things.
Depends if it’s encrypted
Telegram isn’t either. Certainly not by default, and definitely not public channels.
Why arrest him? Why not threaten to block the app in France or something like that?
And why only arrest him? Should the discord creators also be arrested for some shady channels? Should Elon Musk be arrested because twitter is the equivalent of fhe fifth circle of hell?
So they can make a very convincing case for a backdoor, in exchange for his release. And maybe some compensation for continued cooperation. Both come out winning and they get to claim nothing happened.
Government cyber security dealings as usual. or not. who knows?
That conspiracy theory is so dumb.
The government almost certainly doesn’t need a backdoor as telegram is almost completely unencrypted (only one-to-one channels can be but aren’t by default). The real (but more boring) conspiracy theory is that governments generally don’t mind Telegram because its willfully terrible security model allows them to keep an eye on terrorists and activists’ communications (I have a hard time believing that the NSA or even DGSE don’t have their own backdoors already).
However the EU does have laws mandating the moderation of said unencrypted messages, especially when it comes to CSAM, which Telegram is notoriously poorly moderated. It’s certainly reason enough to arrest and question this guy, at least until formal charges are brought or he walks free. Maybe there are additional political considerations, but there doesn’t have to be.
Also how would arresting this guy help with backdooring. He doesn’t have access to the source code. Whoever he calls to get that done is out of reach of the French police. He has no reason not to disable that backdoor as soon as he gets out of the EU. If he can be bought off he already has been (Crypto AG style except way lamer because no-one clever&important trusts Telegram), you don’t need to arrest someone to pay them. I’m no DSGSE bigwig but pressuring lower level engineers to backdoor their code seems like a 1000% more effective approach.
Hell yeah. I always hated Telegram, because of its countless false promises, misleading claims, bad encryption (which isn’t even enabled by default) and shady background.
That bad encryption was not cracked for now. The other one, that is used to process chats between 2 users in end to end mode, can’t be enabled by default because it assumes no history is kept and no support for group chats.
Also, the arrest doesn’t seem to be related to any of the things you mentioned. If anything it shows there are no ways for (certain) governments to affect the messenger, for now.
That bad encryption was not cracked for now.
There’s no need if you control the server.
End to end encryption was created specifically so that the server could not access the data.
That’s right, but it’s not properly implemented in Telegram. https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf