Oddbean

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 I don’t get it. Telegram is plaintext by default. I don’t know a single person who even uses it encrypted. What’s Durov’s point with the story of injecting malicious open source libs into the client?

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 The connection to Telegram servers is encrypted. A backdoor could cc the FBI. Also the FBI might want to listen to the handful of chats that _are_ encrypted.

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 To me it seems to be more in line with previous behavior. Zooko’s thread is worth reading https://x.com/zooko/status/1827780640668062152

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 See also https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789690133765091532

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 Don’t get me wrong… Durov’s arrest is certainly worrisome. But to me TG is grouped public billboard system and I assume messages are already CC’ed to govts worldwide.

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 My guess is the reason for kidnapping was so that France (and its NATO friends) are added to the CC moving forward.

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 I'm fully aware Telegram group chats are not e2e encrypted and their off-by-default DM encryption is dodgy.

But there's still SSL and even if the French government had a backdoor for that, it's a lot of work to monitor the Russian internet that way. It's easier when Telegram forwards the chats to them.

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 (And then use a bullshit excuse about facilitating crime to hide the real reason from the public)

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 Yep, indeed it's time to move to SimpleX and/or Matrix.

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 I'm already on both :-)

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 TG already has to comply with legal requests either way. Regardless of SSL I hope this is wake up call for anyone using TG for private comms.

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 The sort of data intelligence agencies want is not obtained with legal requests. Also Telegram never complies with those.