TelegramThe messaging app, designed to allow users to communicate privately and securely, has become a powerful weapon that Kremlin uses After the invasion of Ukraine against activists and opponents, a detailed investigation by an American magazine revealed Wired.

In the decade since its creation in Russia, Telegram grew up One of the largest social networks in the worldWith 700 million users. “For us, Telegram is an idea,” said its creator, a Russian Pavel Durova. “It’s the idea that everyone on this planet has the right to be free.”

However, the reality seems to be somewhat different. The platform, which is billed as a haven for safe and anonymous communication, asks users to avoid setting their chat “secret”; Unlike WhatsApp or signal, end-to-end encryption is not enabled by default and is not available for groups. Their Encryption protocols are also missing independent verification.

Moxie Marlinspikeco-founder signalTelegram’s American competitor summed it up this way: “After a decade of misleading press and marketing, most people out there believe it’s an ‘encrypted app.’ The reality is the opposite“.

“Telegram has the ability to share almost anything Confidential Information What the government is asking for,” warned a note from an influential media outlet specializing in technology.

This explains how the govt Vladimir Putin It seems that it can read everything that users share on it.

Spy activists

According to experts and activists, the Kremlin has begun exploiting the app’s weaknesses as it ramps up its crackdown on opponents. Telegram has become almost indispensable in Russia over the past year due to Putin’s crackdown on Western tech companies. At the same time, many dissidents saw their accounts monitored or compromised. Hundreds of them have seen their Telegram activity used against them in criminal cases.

“Most disturbing,” the respected journalist’s note reads Darren Lookaid“Is that some activists have discovered that their ‘secret chats’ – Telegram’s supposed strong encryption feature – are behaving strangely, suggesting that an unwanted third party may be listening in.”

Wired cites the case Marina MatzapulinaA young woman, a wartime opponent of Putin and vice president of Russia’s libertarian party, was arrested after investigators read her private Telegram chats while she wrote down what she was told by the agents who arrested her. In a Twitter thread, the activist noted that the “unpleasant” explanation for the event was “clear for all to see.” He said the Russians should have considered the possibility that Telegram would now be in compliance Legal demands from the Kremlin.

“I don’t want to spread panic, I don’t want to pretend that I’m some kind of expert on this topic, but I want to urge everyone to be careful what you say on Telegram. It may no longer be the safe space that everyone believed it to be,” Matsapulina writes and declares that she will use it from now on. signal.

Even more mysterious are some of the activities in which dissidents have found their role. “secret chats”, Arguably the most secure Telegram setting.

For example, the opposition Anna Kurbatova He noticed that both his regular messages and his secret chats would show up as “read” when he knew the recipient hadn’t read them. He also noticed that sometimes when he exited the secret chat, the session was still marked as “open” and the messages could still be read. This should be impossible: because each chat receives a unique encryption key that disappears after the session ends

In most cases, however, Telegram’s lack of transparency “makes it impossible to know what’s really going on … whether spyware or Kremlin informants were used to break in,” it said. Wired.

The result was that a large part of the Russian opposition movement abandoned Telegram. “People left Russia to emigrate,” he said Wired Ksenia ErmoshinaA researcher at Citizen Lab and the Center for Internet and Society, “And they left Telegram in exile!”

insecure interface

Experts say that it is designed that way Telegram Allows access to User Content mass surveillance. That is, if a government or other organization wanted to access citizens’ data, it could do so without a formal request to the company.

“Telegram gives you almost everything,” he said Jordan WildonA researcher at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that monitors disinformation and extremism.

This is due, on the one hand, to the design of its application programming interface (API), a software portal through which application developers and researchers can connect to the platform and extract data from it for their own projects. In case TelegramThis data includes the textual content and metadata of any group chats or public channels, and even a record of when users were last logged in.

On the other hand, messages Telegram They are also available to people inside the company. “In other words, Telegram has the ability to share almost any sensitive information that the government requests.” Consumers just have to believe it won’t happen,” he warns. Wired.

This is not the only risk of using the app. The war in Ukraine showed that the design of Telegram also put it People in danger: “At the beginning of the war… it was possible to rig Telegram’s location API to detect any user within a 3 kilometer radius if they had recently activated location,” he explained. Wheeldon.

Stanislav Seleznevlawyer AgoraA human rights group representing thousands of people who have been under Kremlin surveillance since 2005 has told Wired that he has “absolutely no doubt” that the Kremlin is using the Telegram API on a large scale.

The Kremlin is reportedly investing hundreds of millions of dollars to strengthen its internet infrastructure, including ones that automatically scan social media platforms for illegal content. for that Seleznevalso works with Russian technology companies such as SeusLabwhich processes billions of social media pages and instant messaging chats per day to create detailed user profiles based on “Political activity.”.”

Still, large numbers of Russians remain dependent on Telegram, and its growth at home and around the world has been fueled rather than halted by the war in Ukraine.

“People still trust Telegram for some reason,” he said Andrei Soldatov, a freelance journalist who has been investigating Russia’s security services for over 20 years. “But I don’t know why.”

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