#Telegram is a tricky ecosystem from security perspective, because it’s quite diverse and complex:
- Public groups and chats are widely used by both #Russia and #Ukraine. These include both publicly available and “private” (invite-only) chats neither can be really considered secret because…
- …group chats can’t be end-to-end encrypted (E2EE), so their contents are readable to at least Telegram operators, probably as easily as running a single SQL query.
- Telegram bots don’t support E2EE either.
So here’s an important distinction: while Telegram is great and highly usable for disseminating public or semi-public information (unencrypted public or invite-only groups), it’s quite poor for highly confidential communications. Yet, especially the Russian side uses it a lot for just that - there are reports of “secret groups” used for front-line command or control, correction of fire or as a channel for communication with spies and collaborators in Ukraine. Except these “secret groups” really aren’t, at least not in OPSEC and cryptographic sense (groups can’t use E2EE in Telegram).
This is one purely marketing win for Telegram, because even mainstream journalists notoriously confuse these concepts.
Yes, it is technically possible that a Russian operator opens an actual “secret chat” with each of his collaborator, but it’s highly impractical and I doubt majority of them do it.
Which is further confirmed by the panic caused by detention of Durov in Russian military channels 🤷
In any case, France taking over Telegram infrastructure is still highly speculative - the main point of the arrest is almost complete lack of moderation in Telegram, even for the most severe CSAM (child abuse) content.
While in Russia arrest of Durov would likely lead to his genitals being connected to a field telephone in order to convince him to hand over the infrastructure (that’s why he ran away from Russia in the first place), in #France he will be likely just subject to a regular, boring law enforcement process that ends with a trial and suspended sentence, at best, if he agrees to improve content moderation. Part of the panic in Russia is that Russian routinely project the practices of their own law enforcement onto everyone else.