I hope the courage of this lady resulted in many many women escaping from evil, to give strength to other survivors, and a lesson for law enforcement to take any future complaints/tips seriously...
Ms Pelicot has been praised for insisting that the case took place in public in order to raise awareness about the issue.
I hope the courage of this lady resulted in many many women escaping from evil, to give strength to other survivors, and a lesson for law enforcement to take any future complaints/tips seriously immediately.
Telegram, set up by Russian tech billionaire Pavel Durov in 2013, has long been the go-to messaging platform for criminals due to the firm’s refusal to share any data with government agencies.
The platform's refusal to share has also been instrumental in many people escaping violence and oppression, though. More internal monitoring is needed, and more swift and decisive actions are needed to close groups for sure. But I don't want to see telegram being forced to give data to authorities either.
It's sad but invariably news like this is co-opted by the ever present push from various governments and law enforcement agencies to force services to share user data. What that would mean is the...
don't want to see telegram being forced to give data to authorities either.
It's sad but invariably news like this is co-opted by the ever present push from various governments and law enforcement agencies to force services to share user data.
What that would mean is the outlawing of end to end encryption. Without doing that it's impossible to monitor what users are doing (on telegram you have to enable 'private' chat but once enabled it's not possible for Telegram to see or share your communications).
Outlawing e2e encryption would mean the end of private communication full stop. So far, attempts to circumvent (i.e. required backdoors) or outlaw e2ee have mostly failed but they won't ever give up trying. One thing they rely on is the public's ignorance of the implications.
What if they put a TON of money into (entrapment?) sting operations? If the police has one end of an illegal conversation decrypted, is that enough to go to ISP and say hey I need this guy's IP?...
What if they put a TON of money into (entrapment?) sting operations? If the police has one end of an illegal conversation decrypted, is that enough to go to ISP and say hey I need this guy's IP? I'm not saying they should, I'm asking on a technical level if e2e could be preserved by law enforcement doing stings
Not really. There are plenty of scenarios where it's impossible to prove a case without communication records that you're not a part of. Think of RICO cases for organized crime. If you're a mob...
Not really. There are plenty of scenarios where it's impossible to prove a case without communication records that you're not a part of. Think of RICO cases for organized crime.
If you're a mob boss, you've probably ordered your people to kill others on your behalf. Even if you arrest the hitman, theres nothing tying that guy to you, unless he decides to rat on you (which he probably won't, because he knows if he does, he and his entire family are dead). Without communication records, the cops can't prove that you ordered the hit, and they can't do a sting operation, because for one, the murder has already happened, and secondly, mob bosses aren't going to ask strangers to do illegal hits for them.
There's no other way to prove that case other than having solid proof that you ordered someone to kill someone on your behalf.
Obviously an intelligent gangster is only going to use a communication method they're reasonably sure is private, so it's not likely you have many of them texting each other about hits, but the availability of e2ee certainly makes running a criminal enterprise easier.
You can't have it both ways unfortunately. Either a communication method is private, or it's not. Swift and decisive action to close groups necessitates being able to read those groups. If your...
You can't have it both ways unfortunately. Either a communication method is private, or it's not.
Swift and decisive action to close groups necessitates being able to read those groups. If your messaging app is end to end encrypted, you inherently cannot moderate it.
If it isn't, you're legally required to comply with warrants. Either you comply with those warrants, or you operate somewhere where the country that is issuing the warrants doesn't have legal reach.
There's no middle ground where chats are totally private while you also moderate abusive content.
Not at all surprised that it's on Telegram. I used to actively used Telegram years ago to chat with my friends but we've all since moved off it. No matter what kind of public group you were in, it...
Not at all surprised that it's on Telegram. I used to actively used Telegram years ago to chat with my friends but we've all since moved off it. No matter what kind of public group you were in, it felt almost guaranteed for some bot account to join and spam links to join groups for all kinds of nasty and illegal things.
I use it for 1:1 messaging only, no groups mainly because it has good clients on every desktop platform, which is an oddly rare thing (Signal desktop feels like an afterthought for example).
I use it for 1:1 messaging only, no groups mainly because it has good clients on every desktop platform, which is an oddly rare thing (Signal desktop feels like an afterthought for example).
Yeah I sometimes miss Telegram because it's clients weren't entirely dependent on my phone like WhatsApp and Signal's desktop clients were. Nowadays I just use iMessage and Facebook Messenger...
Yeah I sometimes miss Telegram because it's clients weren't entirely dependent on my phone like WhatsApp and Signal's desktop clients were. Nowadays I just use iMessage and Facebook Messenger though I wish I could move off the latter and truly be free from Meta's products.
I'm also not surprised, but for a different reason - I first learned of Telegram when I met some German friends who used it, and anecdotally, continually noticed it being fairly popular in Germany...
I'm also not surprised, but for a different reason - I first learned of Telegram when I met some German friends who used it, and anecdotally, continually noticed it being fairly popular in Germany vs. elsewhere in western Europe. I don't so much know about eastern Europe but I know it's popular in Ukraine too and that connection makes more sense.
Telegram is reasonably popular here in Germany. I'm only in a few small local groups myself but it's very functional for that sort of thing. The only major alternative when people started...
Telegram is reasonably popular here in Germany. I'm only in a few small local groups myself but it's very functional for that sort of thing. The only major alternative when people started switching to it was WhatsApp, and I think a lot of the more privacy-minded folks here switched there from WhatsApp due to Facebook's ownership. I know my master's degree class made a Telegram group instead of a WhatsApp group because one of the master's students had already sworn off WhatsApp. While it's a generalization, Germans definitely tend to be more privacy-oriented than other countries in Europe in my experience, and I don't think Signal was big or fully-featured enough when Telegram was becoming entrenched.
I'm more in agreement with you here -- I think it's a Telegram group just because it's German and Telegram is popular here, not because of anything inherent to Telegram. I've gotten a couple spam messages on Telegram but far fewer than I have on WhatsApp.
I hope the courage of this lady resulted in many many women escaping from evil, to give strength to other survivors, and a lesson for law enforcement to take any future complaints/tips seriously immediately.
The platform's refusal to share has also been instrumental in many people escaping violence and oppression, though. More internal monitoring is needed, and more swift and decisive actions are needed to close groups for sure. But I don't want to see telegram being forced to give data to authorities either.
It's sad but invariably news like this is co-opted by the ever present push from various governments and law enforcement agencies to force services to share user data.
What that would mean is the outlawing of end to end encryption. Without doing that it's impossible to monitor what users are doing (on telegram you have to enable 'private' chat but once enabled it's not possible for Telegram to see or share your communications).
Outlawing e2e encryption would mean the end of private communication full stop. So far, attempts to circumvent (i.e. required backdoors) or outlaw e2ee have mostly failed but they won't ever give up trying. One thing they rely on is the public's ignorance of the implications.
What if they put a TON of money into (entrapment?) sting operations? If the police has one end of an illegal conversation decrypted, is that enough to go to ISP and say hey I need this guy's IP? I'm not saying they should, I'm asking on a technical level if e2e could be preserved by law enforcement doing stings
I think that's a great solution, I don't see any reason it wouldn't work.
Then it means anything else they're saying to justify dismantling e2e really is just power grabbing charades? Hmmmmm
Not really. There are plenty of scenarios where it's impossible to prove a case without communication records that you're not a part of. Think of RICO cases for organized crime.
If you're a mob boss, you've probably ordered your people to kill others on your behalf. Even if you arrest the hitman, theres nothing tying that guy to you, unless he decides to rat on you (which he probably won't, because he knows if he does, he and his entire family are dead). Without communication records, the cops can't prove that you ordered the hit, and they can't do a sting operation, because for one, the murder has already happened, and secondly, mob bosses aren't going to ask strangers to do illegal hits for them.
There's no other way to prove that case other than having solid proof that you ordered someone to kill someone on your behalf.
Obviously an intelligent gangster is only going to use a communication method they're reasonably sure is private, so it's not likely you have many of them texting each other about hits, but the availability of e2ee certainly makes running a criminal enterprise easier.
You can't have it both ways unfortunately. Either a communication method is private, or it's not.
Swift and decisive action to close groups necessitates being able to read those groups. If your messaging app is end to end encrypted, you inherently cannot moderate it.
If it isn't, you're legally required to comply with warrants. Either you comply with those warrants, or you operate somewhere where the country that is issuing the warrants doesn't have legal reach.
There's no middle ground where chats are totally private while you also moderate abusive content.
Not at all surprised that it's on Telegram. I used to actively used Telegram years ago to chat with my friends but we've all since moved off it. No matter what kind of public group you were in, it felt almost guaranteed for some bot account to join and spam links to join groups for all kinds of nasty and illegal things.
I use it for 1:1 messaging only, no groups mainly because it has good clients on every desktop platform, which is an oddly rare thing (Signal desktop feels like an afterthought for example).
Yeah I sometimes miss Telegram because it's clients weren't entirely dependent on my phone like WhatsApp and Signal's desktop clients were. Nowadays I just use iMessage and Facebook Messenger though I wish I could move off the latter and truly be free from Meta's products.
I'm also not surprised, but for a different reason - I first learned of Telegram when I met some German friends who used it, and anecdotally, continually noticed it being fairly popular in Germany vs. elsewhere in western Europe. I don't so much know about eastern Europe but I know it's popular in Ukraine too and that connection makes more sense.
Telegram is reasonably popular here in Germany. I'm only in a few small local groups myself but it's very functional for that sort of thing. The only major alternative when people started switching to it was WhatsApp, and I think a lot of the more privacy-minded folks here switched there from WhatsApp due to Facebook's ownership. I know my master's degree class made a Telegram group instead of a WhatsApp group because one of the master's students had already sworn off WhatsApp. While it's a generalization, Germans definitely tend to be more privacy-oriented than other countries in Europe in my experience, and I don't think Signal was big or fully-featured enough when Telegram was becoming entrenched.
I'm more in agreement with you here -- I think it's a Telegram group just because it's German and Telegram is popular here, not because of anything inherent to Telegram. I've gotten a couple spam messages on Telegram but far fewer than I have on WhatsApp.
Functionally WhatsApp seems solid but the Facebook ownership really doesn’t feel great. Wish it’d been able to stay independent.