There's quite popular conspiracy theory in Russia that says that Telegram was FSB-backed project from the start, and the whole failed ban was implemented to promote it. However, there's still no concrete proof that government has backdoor access to it, so if they do, they're being very careful about it.
The most obvious fact is that Mr. Durov is not walking with a hole in his head, as a double digit portion of anybody who had balls to be audacious about their opposition, and is not known to have an extensive security detail.
The mob has sent hitment to people whose offences were way lesser than that.
Their ways are unyielding, and uncompromising. Putin has a record killing people who grieved him more than a decade ago, keeping trying for years on end. People he killed some times survived 2-3, even 4, assassination attempts over years, just to be eventually killed by yet another one.
Knowing that, it's hard to explain how Telegram kept maintaining an office in Russia.
It's not that you're wrong; it's that that I wouldn't be so sure that you're right about it.
Russia's leadership is not monolithic, and it's decisions are not rational. Some critics are killed even though they do not pose a significant threat. Some are able to continue their fight. Some have allies on the inside; some are said to actually be controlled by the government.
If anything, history of such politics teaches me that it's chaos all the way down and almost no one has the full picture, neither knows what he's doing.
This is the most important thing to understand: non-Russian media loves to persist a never-ending charade that the whole of the Russian government is a direct limb of Putin and controlled wholly by him, which is quite far from true. It makes for a good narrative though, and since the Russian government is perhaps closer to that model than others, passes by readers unnoticed.
There are very much parts of the Russian political elite that will use violent and coercive means outside their official mandate to silence individuals. Roskomnadzor isn't really one of those, and is mostly limited to spewing more things onto blocklists to the chagrin of ISPs and people who actually understand the internet.
More likely Telegram is unblocked because someone higher-up finally got around to telling Roskomnadzor to fuck off and stop being a nuisance here, since its order never succeeded in actually blocking Telegram and mostly served to disrupt access to cloud service providers (breaking other, non-Telegram applications) as RKN ineffectually tried to issue block orders for entire AWS and GCP network ranges. Other parts of the government clearly didn't care much about the order (they continued to use Telegram for official business after the block), and it seems like it was either RKN attempting to flex its muscles to impress higher-ups or an unsuccessful attempt to put pressure on Telegram that the government has finally given up on.
I took a time and read it and also read much more.
It is a good example of "he said she said". But Igor Ashmanov considers Rosenberg a good source on Durov brothers and lets say information above is correct.
That means that Durov is used a part of the real estate he had access to to help development of Telegram. It does not mean that Durov is (not) affiliated with Russian government it just means that for Durov it is useful to use Russian real estate he knows and adores and to use Russian talent.
It looks like Telegram servers are somewhere in Europe, BTW.
>The most obvious fact is that Mr. Durov is not walking with a hole in his head, as a double digit portion of anybody who had balls to be audacious about their opposition.
I think you are talking about Clinton Foundation, aren't you? A joke, of course.
Can you help me to access statistics from which you inferred "double digit portion"?
Not that I am pro-Russian-government, I am not. I just sense here something that is not completely right with my view of the world and I want to get better in that regard.
If you're seriously going to downvote me and claim that Russia hasn't been assassinating people then you're either being paid by their government or you're just being a troll. If you want to dispute the list Wikipedia posted, then dispute it. The "But the US kills people too!" is literally completely irrelevant. And if you want to cite a list of US journalists who have been hunted down and assassinated by direction of the President, be my guest - please just hold your breath until your list hits 5 names.
The idea isn't that Russia doesn't assassinate people, it does. The idea is that Russia assassinates everyone that opposes it even when it is against their interest.
So... we're moving the goal posts? Because OP said he didn't believe that double digit people had been assassinated by Russia, so I provided his proof. I haven't seen anyone claim "Russia assassinates EVERYONE that opposes it" besides you.
The claim was not that more than 9 people were assassinated by Russia, but that 10% or more of the entire opposition was assassinated. Which is absolutely not supported and would lead to at the very least hundreds of thousands of assassinations.
And now I'd like to see a list of living Russian people who oppose Russian government. The problem, for me, was the claim about double digits part (I think it was about percentage - the double digits thing).
Is it Nemtsov "an audacious opposition" in your opinion? As much as I don't like the Putin rule, Nemtsov popularity was really minor to influence anything. If anything it was the "non-systematic opposition" who won most from his death.
Sorry, but you managed to write both grotesque and extremely simplified description of Russian political practices.
There's absolutely no point in making any physical moves against Durov even if he was openly anti-Putin and supported opposition in any way. It's never done like that. He's already forced out of the country and is not considered a direct threat. He or his remaining actives may be considered a future asset, on the other hand.
> even if he was openly anti-Putin and supported opposition in any way
This implies he does not support opposition in any way. This is not true. He does support opposition rallies—when they are held to support his cause, true, but such is political climate in Russia that publically supporting those who vocally oppose the state policy is a domain for very few and quite brave.
When Libertarian Party of Russia was organizing a rally in 2017 to protest Telegram ban, Durov contacted the Party himself. (I'm a member of LP RU.)
I don't count on Telegram security but Durov's public image and actions are certainly noticeable and appreciated by opposition.
> This implies he does not support opposition in any way. This is not true.
It implied just that I don't know for sure and it does not change a lot. Even Khodorkovsky is not considered a threat worthy of eliminating - he much better serves the cause being a propaganda target. Durov has even more to offer to Russian gov't (digital technology is the new arms race) so he has even lesser chance of bodily harm.
But isn't it remarkable that Telegram after all of these years still doesn't do E2EE by default, Telegram rolls its own crypto (of which the first version had significant problems) and still Telegram is used so much in Russia?
Minor correction. Telegram does not use its own crypto, it uses well-known cryptographic primitives. (However community criticised telegram for the poor choice of those well-known primitives)
>However, there's still no concrete proof that government has backdoor access to it, so if they do, they're being very careful about it.
Sadly I feel like that is a very real possibility for any software / hardware produced in any significantly non free country.
It can happen in other countries, but the likelihood of you hearing about it seems much much higher.
It's a sad situation as I don't like the idea of being suspicious by default of other developers / products simply because their country of origin, but I have trouble avoiding the obvious fact that even a well meaning developer / company based in those countries would / could easily be pressured into introducing some sort of access (doesn't matter how) and it's simply unlikely we'd know.
Most developed countries have access like that already baked in by law [0], some countries even go as far as denying any reasonable expectation of privacy for data you share with third-parties [1] so the data-Kraken of intelligence services can just slurp it all up in bulk [2].
In that context, in a post-Snowden world, it's kinda grating to still have people talk about all the evil things that supposedly happen in "non free countries", while mostly being completely unaware about what their own, supposedly "free", countries are doing, often on a global scale because they are supposedly way more likely to "hear" about it, while still not being able to change anything about it.
It's only up to Snowden because he managed to successfully evade getting captured, even tho the US went trough quite some lengths [0] trying to capture him and already had a plane ready to rendition him back to the US [1].
If they caught him, he would not have been able to properly defend himself because US law would prohibit him from making his case [2].
Heck, if they would have caught him before his Hong Kong meeting, they could simply have "vanished" him and nobody would have been any the wiser, as Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill would have had a very difficult time proving the legitimacy of the leaked documents.
So no, neither the Snowden of the US, nor of China gets any of these options, that's why this whole false dichotomy of "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war.
The best chance whistleblowers like that have is trying to escape the sphere of influence of whoever they blew the whistle on. For Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and others that's large parts of the world they will be welcomed in, for US whistleblowers it's pretty much only a handful of countries out of whom only a very few are actually able to keep them save/not straight up hand them over.
I suspect if the US wished to vanish him, it would be done.
There's a whole world of talk of Snowden and others supposedly going to be vanished and it for whatever reason the fact that it hasn't happened seems entirely lost on folks who talk about it.
> "free countries vs nonfree countries" is just another facette of the constantly going on propaganda war.
I don't know what you're trying to say about that. I think there are real differences between freedoms allowed in different nations and they have real impacts.
> Like I said it can happen anywhere, but the likelihood and ease of it happening in less free countries seems significantly different.
Why? Bureaucracy, Intelligence Services and state-level paranoia transcends political ideologies and systems.
> The amount of news / data about it will of course be higher in more free nations.
On the other hand, we'd hear a lot more about anything from Moscow in our media, so I doubt there's a lot to be talked about as of now. It's only one big leak away, of course, but so far, I don't see a lot of support for your theory.
Because in free countries there's a actually the potential for individuals and groups to refuse to cooperate and make the request known.
If China comes to you and tells you to hand over the keys, you don't go to court or the news media ... in the west you can actually refuse and we see that happen and play out in the courts and etc.
> In free countries there are court cases about such things. Not in less free countries.
Russia literally had court proceedings about Telegram, which this post is about. Is Russia not a "less free country"? Or are those not "real court cases" while "ours" are totally real (but you can't talk about them and must play charades, and the opposing side has super powers written into the law)? If you need help carrying those goal posts, let me know.
> The Snowden of China doesn't get his day in court, maybe never talked if his family back home was at risk.
Neither does the Snowden of the US of A, you know, that one guy... right, Snowden, who has to hide in Russia of all places to not get shipped off to Gitmo. And even if he took that route, I'm sure the apologists would say "well, this is one of those small imperfections but he's fortunate that he's not in Russia".
