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Telegram has become a key tool for the Russian military. Why does Moscow continue to rely on a Dubai-based civilian messaging app? — Meduza
meduza.ioTech billionaire Pavel Durov’s arrest in France has reignited debate in Russia over the Telegram messenger app’s role in the war in Ukraine. The last round of discussion surrounding the issue came as recently as July, when the State Duma passed a law allowing new punishments for soldiers who use “civilian” devices while deployed. After a wave of criticism from pro-war bloggers and state media “war correspondents” who feared the new policy would leave Russian troops with no reliable means of communication, the law was watered down. Now, the same groups are discussing whether the “keys to Telegram” are at risk of being handed over to the West, and whether the messenger could be blocked by the Russian authorities. According to these commentators, Telegram has become the main communication tool of the war, linking various military branches and hierarchy levels into a single management, intelligence sharing, and target engagement complex, though this is a gross exaggeration. Meduza explains what we know about how the Russian military actually uses Telegram, what other programs its uses for battlefield communication, and why it still hasn’t developed its own platform to replace the Dubai-based app.
I had a thought. The fsb basically had unlimited free access to any ICQ conversation, but they let it die instead or pushing it as the national chat app. Why? Seems a wasted opportunity to have everyone on telegram where everything is supposedly encrypted if there could have been an alternative where everything was in clear text.
One possibility is that Russia can read the encryption. They push, or allow, people to use Telegram because it gives false confidence that messages cannot be read which encourages people to share information they otherwise wouldn’t.
That exact strategy has been employed by the Security and Intelligence services of other nations. Here’s an example from 2021 of the FBI pushing Anom.
I doubt that is what is going on here since it’s their military using this. That Anom story is terrifying. Entrapment techniques like that make me sick. For. Every “criminal” they caught think of how many innocent people were violated by this.
What was the entrapment? The FBI sold phones to suspected criminals and monitored the conversations, didn’t they?
Nonsense. How do you market an encryption platform exclusively to criminals? That may have been their target but there would be a large number of innocents that downloaded this as a secure messaging system.
Yes, it was marketed in the dark web marketplaces as “the phone for criminals”
That app could run only on a special custom ROM. It was a dedicated phone, a Google pixel 4a with locked bootloader and a custom ROM that exclusively allowed to communicate with other anom users. You don’t buy a $2000 phone that could only communicate with other $2000 phones if you don’t have something to hide.
It might have happened that maybe a millionaire with disposable income bought a set to talk with his secret girl affair but those were definitely the minority
Apparently through word of mouth and suggestions by undercover agents.
The app wasn’t made available for download. The FBI bought a few thousand Pixels, flashed a custom ROM onto them, and then installed the messaging apps. In theory they cost thousands of dollars to buy.
It’s entirely possible some innocents used the system, but it’s unclear how selling rooted hardware to alleged criminals would induce them to commit crime.
See https://www.npr.org/2024/05/31/1197959218/fbi-phone-company-anom
😂 Nice try
Don’t overestimate FSB. They never had the means to make ICQ the national chat in the first place. Russia is not North Korea, it’s not a full-blown totalitarian state even today. There was no opportunity.