Good luck. They tried to block it in Russia, but it simply broke their own internet for a while and the effectiveness was spotty until they gave up. To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram, despite not being E2EE by default, if we don't consider conspiracy theories, unlike all the other services used in Russia which are basically all backdoored by the state directly. I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
You're commenting on the news of their enforcement. They are completely fine with blocking Telegram nation-wide until they reveal the user data and pay the fine.
Don't give me that "good luck" speech either. The article mentions the same judges blocked Telegram last year. I submitted news of that here and people here gave me the exact same "lol good luck telegram didn't even submit to Russia" response. A few days later I got the news that Telegram paid the fine.
> I don't think Telegram has a legal presence in Brazil though. How are they going to enforce the fine?
I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines.
Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines and the blocking.
It's a nice story, the founder in exile fighting to keep his unrestricted messaging service, even against the fangs of an authoritarian government that regularly outright murders people around the world. A history of some technical sloppyness, we overlook it as "growth hacking". I'm afraid believing in that is about as smart as those criminals were trusting EncroChat.
> To this day I believe there is quite little cooperation between the Russian government and Telegram
I find it fascinating that Telegram is (and was back when they tried to block it) the most popular messenger and possibly even social network in Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, for crying out loud, writes his thuggish notes on Telegram, from which they then get propagated by mass media. Ramzan Kadyrov, too, posts to Telegram. It's so embarrassing to see after their attempt to block it for some reason.
There's a law for the internet in Brazil, called Marco Civil, which literally states that ISPs can be blocked and forbidden from providing services if they don't comply with takedown requests issued by the authorities.
They were blocked quite a few times in the past 4-5 years. If I remember correctly there was a time that it was blocked for up to 2 days because they were deciding if they should pay the fine and hand over the data, or remain blocked.
I totally disagree with these rulings in favor of blocking social media apps (even though it could do us good by banning or difficulting disinformation from reaching people), but you do realize that Telegram is not the app it used to be or should be anymore, right? Pavel Durov, its CEO, is an absolute weirdo that tries to play god because he owns huge social media platforms, one of them being VK, which is heavily monitored by the Russian government.
So, if you think you are safe using Telegram, think again.
"Blocking" in Russia was nothing else than an internal drill by KGB to check robustness to possible blocking in the target fields of operations, e.g. Brazil.
If Russia TRULY wanted to block Telegram, then Mr. Durov, who accidentally operates from and resides in Russia, would have been kidnapped and tortured until Telegram goes down or he hands the keys over to KGB.
Since Durov is still alive and free... the conclusion is kind of obvious.
Unfortunately this site hasn't been updated since 2016, but I don't think that's because these kinds of orders have stopped being issued. They've previously been issued on various occasions by a state judge when a company either ignores or says it can't technically comply with a subpoena or injunction in a court case, and have so far usually been overturned by Brazilian appeals courts.
Supposedly it's about the children. Sao Paulo solved the problem:
> Many Brazilian states didn’t wait for the federal response. Sao Paulo, for example, temporarily hired 550 psychologists to attend to its public schools, and hired 1,000 private security guards.
This is what disgruntled poor people did in China, too, used a $5 hatchet. You don't even need to be able to afford a gun .
I don't see a (neo)Nazi angle in that crime, though. There's no clear motive for the attack yet and no connection to Telegram either (based on coverage in DW and The Guardian), so I'm guessing Lula is simply trying to crack down on free speech.
Users who want private comms with encryption and metadata cleansing can use decentralized blockchain based services such as xx Network's xxMessenger. xxMessenger can be blocked by the ISPs by blocking outgoing connections to xx gateways, but desktop-only Speakeasy Tech can use Tor Network (Tor Browser's Socks5 proxy or Arti) so it's likely to work better when telcos and ISPs are ordered to block connections or DNS lookups.
There are other, similar networks, I just don't know enough about them to make specific recommendations.
Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one.
Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
Taken case by case, no. The absolute majority of those cases are used to get ISPs to block pirate streaming sites, or sites selling personal data.
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
No, it sounds like a civil law country dealing with a recalcitrant business. I think the judge is reaching a bit but I don't know much about Brazil's legal code. Common law countries tend to be extremely accommodating of business entities because they're obsessed with procedure (imho) to the detriment of doing any enforcement. Civil law jurisdictions take the approach of 'we need compliance up front, we can quibble about legal liability afterwards.' Common law countries demand high levels of personal accountability but have elaborate mechanics for distributing accountability across organizations that (again imho) allow the creation of private quasi-sovereignty, and they maintain this in part because it attracts capital to those countries.
The word "dictatorship" doesn't actually mean anything. Its sole purpose is to attack certain institutions and/or governments, while excluding other institutions and governments from criticism even though they share most or all of the same characteristics.
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
Not yet but Congress is trying to approve a "fake news" package which tries to put more responsibilities on the hands of Big Tech regarding monitoring online content.
When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not.
Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information.
A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. They have money when Telegram is expensive to run, not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life.
The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.
> I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia.
Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA?
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.
> They have money when Telegram is expensive to run
They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by selling bonds last year and to make Telegram self-sustainable, introduced Telegram Premium.
> not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life
Which is why Durov (and his whole dev team) moved to the UAE in the first place!
I'm all for healthy skepticism, but there must be a limit. Unproven conspiracies aren't helping anyone, especially from people who have no issues with apps like WhatsApp. Telegram has time and again tried to fight government intervention, and yet that's not enough. The clients are open-source, everything audited by independent researchers and yet, people aren't afraid to make claims that they can't prove.
Sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff. It is encrypted client-server so your message is misleading. And Durov as far as I'm aware is in Dubai. Russia blocked Telegram in the past and because they actually failed (it was still most popular messenger in there despite the block), so they decided to give up the block and started pumping their own propaganda on their own channels.
They just couldn't win and gave up. They accidentally crippled Github, large portions of google cloud and even their own government services while trying to blacklist Telegram and figured it was not worth the risk and getting laughed at.
The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm? Sorry for a trivial question, I am not a user.
It is imperative to enforce the law and block internet platforms that fail to comply with legal regulations. The internet cannot serve as a sanctuary for promoting neo-Nazi groups and other illegal activities, as it must remain subject to legal jurisdiction. All individuals and organizations, whether online or offline, must be held accountable to the law. It is unacceptable to allow hate speech, homophobia, and the promotion of heinous crimes, such as child murder, to proliferate unchecked. The platform Telegram, for example, was rightfully blocked for refusing to provide authorities with phone numbers. It is essential that this platform and others that violate legal standards be severely punished to ensure compliance with the law.
I'm not a digital privacy dogmatist and in like general terms I agree that sometimes states have legitimate powers to wiretap or whatever. And I agree that the idea that any group of people anywhere can communicate in near perfect secrecy about whatever they want is a little scary. But technology has put us in a challenging position wherein it seems like our only two choices are living in a perfect surveillance state all the time, where everything can be, in principal, observed by the state at a whim and the former reality, where people can have genuinely private communications.
When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.
Honestly, I don´t know what this type of post is doing on HN. Very strong political bias and misinformation being spread in the comments, feels like I'm on Reddit.
> The company told the police that the groups had been deleted and that it could not recover the data.
The judge's order to suspend telegram is because they did not comply, which apparently saying "that data does not exist" is not complying.
If "No, we cannot give you that data" is grounds for this sort of action, that sounds an awful lot like "companies cannot delete or end-to-end encrypt user's data", since those operations would similarly result in a "no, it is not technically possible to give you user's data".
Yes, here in Germany it's also one of the favorite platforms for extremists and not taking literal incitement to terrorism down is crazy.
Also Telegram's tactic of non-compliance and operating out of Dubai and being borderline unreachable just isn't acceptable for a company with 700 million users. Companies are still subject to the law and they can go to a court if they have an objection. But this cat and mouse game with authorities needs to be shut down much more aggressively.
You and JP Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace can have words.
There's 195 nations on this planet. Should every company lower themselves below every nation? Without question? There's far more provinces with some lawmaking capability. How logistically do we even begin to figure out how to obey each & every single local rule?
These nations are on the internet. It's an unplace to connect all places. If your area has stupid beef, it's on you to handle your shit & make it so. The whole world doesn't bend to your local rules, it doesn't alter the rules of the entire internet.
"Every company should implement mass censorship and encourage countries to overstep"
This is a really weak defeatist position.
Brazil's administration is attempting to silence opposition voices, this has nothing to do with Nazis. Much like the EU uses "hate speech" laws to silence mass immigration skeptics, this is a political measure to silence people.
[+] [-] alwayslikethis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|2 years ago|reply
You're commenting on the news of their enforcement. They are completely fine with blocking Telegram nation-wide until they reveal the user data and pay the fine.
Don't give me that "good luck" speech either. The article mentions the same judges blocked Telegram last year. I submitted news of that here and people here gave me the exact same "lol good luck telegram didn't even submit to Russia" response. A few days later I got the news that Telegram paid the fine.
[+] [-] pmeira|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|2 years ago|reply
I'm sure they are banking on the idea that Telegram cares more about having users in Brazil than about the money. The Brazilian government can decide not to unblock Telegram until they pay the fines.
Of course, if it's that difficult to block Telegram as you suggest, they may eventually give up on both the fines and the blocking.
[+] [-] stefan_|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azangru|2 years ago|reply
I find it fascinating that Telegram is (and was back when they tried to block it) the most popular messenger and possibly even social network in Russia. Dmitry Medvedev, for crying out loud, writes his thuggish notes on Telegram, from which they then get propagated by mass media. Ramzan Kadyrov, too, posts to Telegram. It's so embarrassing to see after their attempt to block it for some reason.
[+] [-] xinayder|2 years ago|reply
There's a law for the internet in Brazil, called Marco Civil, which literally states that ISPs can be blocked and forbidden from providing services if they don't comply with takedown requests issued by the authorities.
They were blocked quite a few times in the past 4-5 years. If I remember correctly there was a time that it was blocked for up to 2 days because they were deciding if they should pay the fine and hand over the data, or remain blocked.
I totally disagree with these rulings in favor of blocking social media apps (even though it could do us good by banning or difficulting disinformation from reaching people), but you do realize that Telegram is not the app it used to be or should be anymore, right? Pavel Durov, its CEO, is an absolute weirdo that tries to play god because he owns huge social media platforms, one of them being VK, which is heavily monitored by the Russian government.
So, if you think you are safe using Telegram, think again.
[+] [-] vitorgrs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karp773|2 years ago|reply
If Russia TRULY wanted to block Telegram, then Mr. Durov, who accidentally operates from and resides in Russia, would have been kidnapped and tortured until Telegram goes down or he hands the keys over to KGB.
Since Durov is still alive and free... the conclusion is kind of obvious.
[+] [-] schoen|2 years ago|reply
https://bloqueios.info/en/timeline/
Unfortunately this site hasn't been updated since 2016, but I don't think that's because these kinds of orders have stopped being issued. They've previously been issued on various occasions by a state judge when a company either ignores or says it can't technically comply with a subpoena or injunction in a court case, and have so far usually been overturned by Brazilian appeals courts.
[+] [-] din_sup|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymousiam|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|2 years ago|reply
https://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/05/03/whatsapp-...
[+] [-] vitorgrs|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobotToaster|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antisocialist|2 years ago|reply
> Many Brazilian states didn’t wait for the federal response. Sao Paulo, for example, temporarily hired 550 psychologists to attend to its public schools, and hired 1,000 private security guards.
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-school-violence-guns-attac...
This is what disgruntled poor people did in China, too, used a $5 hatchet. You don't even need to be able to afford a gun .
I don't see a (neo)Nazi angle in that crime, though. There's no clear motive for the attack yet and no connection to Telegram either (based on coverage in DW and The Guardian), so I'm guessing Lula is simply trying to crack down on free speech.
Users who want private comms with encryption and metadata cleansing can use decentralized blockchain based services such as xx Network's xxMessenger. xxMessenger can be blocked by the ISPs by blocking outgoing connections to xx gateways, but desktop-only Speakeasy Tech can use Tor Network (Tor Browser's Socks5 proxy or Arti) so it's likely to work better when telcos and ISPs are ordered to block connections or DNS lookups. There are other, similar networks, I just don't know enough about them to make specific recommendations.
Disclosure: I own xx coins.
[+] [-] speeder|2 years ago|reply
Brazilian had a CIA backed dictatorship during cold War, and when it ended people made sure to make a constitution that would prevent another one.
Sadly the constitution is being ignored for a while now, the current government is strongly against free speech, the previous government also had issues.
Meanwhile the Supreme Court are the ones that really hate the constitution, for example a guy was arrested for saying in an airplane near a judge that he is ashamed of being Brazilian. The last president pointed out our constitution doesn't allow lockdowns without a special council ordering one (to prevent the president from declaring curfew and arresting dissidents) the Supreme Court then ordered lockdowns to be made anyway. (And the media called the president genocidal for pointing out lockdowns were illegal if not done correctly)
[+] [-] bhk|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jalbertoni|2 years ago|reply
However, once every few years, a high profile case suspending something like Whatsapp, Youtube, LinkedIn or Facebook appears. They are usually thrown out of appeals court so fast there's no time for the block order to actually reach the ISPs.
The ones that actually do result in a block have a police investigation behind it, making the whole bureaucracy more slow as there needs to be some back and forth between the police and the company. The fact that Telegram's entire team in Brazil is one lawyer might make this worse.
For example, this particular incident may have come from a misunderstanding. The police asked for all available data on all users of a group chat called "Movimento Anti-Semita Brasileiro" and another with a similar name. I hope the translation should be obvious.
What did Telegram deliver? The requested data of the group admin, not all users.
So now they get blocked until they deliver all the data.
Source for this incident, that is, the legal order for the block: https://www.conjur.com.br/dl/telegram-decisao-suspensao.pdf
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p-e-w|2 years ago|reply
Instead of asking whether or not XYZ is a dictatorship, ask "are they following their own laws and constitution?", "are they respecting universal human rights?", and "in whose interests are they acting?". The answers to those questions are absolutely enlightening and make the differences between countries commonly considered dictatorships and countries commonly considered democracies almost vanish.
[+] [-] xinayder|2 years ago|reply
When I put it like that it doesn't sound so bad, but then you read the text and find out the government and its judiciary institutions have the absolute power of determining if something is deemed as fake news or not.
Then you can say it's actually good because it will prevent or reduce disinformation from spreading. Okay, I wouldn't mind anti-vax statements being blocked, but what if I have information that an authority is corrupt? They would try to censor me, it happened in the past, in 2018 I guess, where a reputable newspaper wrote an article that one of the Supreme Court judges was implicated in the major corruption scandal in Brazil, and a few days later the Supreme Court ordered the takedown of said article. When other mainstream outlets heard about this they just shared the original article to make it more difficult to censor this information.
A couple of weeks later the Supreme Court initiated a long process in which it's the judgy, jury and executioner, a thing that lots of citizens protested, but if you did it back then you'd be called a "bolsonarista" or people would say you're supporting fake news.
[+] [-] dancemethis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ykonstant|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tapoxi|2 years ago|reply
The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.
[+] [-] NayamAmarshe|2 years ago|reply
Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA?
> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.
The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.
> They have money when Telegram is expensive to run
They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by selling bonds last year and to make Telegram self-sustainable, introduced Telegram Premium.
> not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life
Which is why Durov (and his whole dev team) moved to the UAE in the first place!
I'm all for healthy skepticism, but there must be a limit. Unproven conspiracies aren't helping anyone, especially from people who have no issues with apps like WhatsApp. Telegram has time and again tried to fight government intervention, and yet that's not enough. The clients are open-source, everything audited by independent researchers and yet, people aren't afraid to make claims that they can't prove.
[+] [-] wheresmyshadow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jojobas|2 years ago|reply
The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.
[+] [-] karp773|2 years ago|reply
Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm? Sorry for a trivial question, I am not a user.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ttaranto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_compton|2 years ago|reply
When I think of it in those terms, I'd rather humans continue to have privacy, even if it allows ne'er do wells to conspire secretly.
[+] [-] tomjen3|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoctorDabadedoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] epups|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] TheDong|2 years ago|reply
> The company told the police that the groups had been deleted and that it could not recover the data.
The judge's order to suspend telegram is because they did not comply, which apparently saying "that data does not exist" is not complying.
If "No, we cannot give you that data" is grounds for this sort of action, that sounds an awful lot like "companies cannot delete or end-to-end encrypt user's data", since those operations would similarly result in a "no, it is not technically possible to give you user's data".
[+] [-] Barrin92|2 years ago|reply
Also Telegram's tactic of non-compliance and operating out of Dubai and being borderline unreachable just isn't acceptable for a company with 700 million users. Companies are still subject to the law and they can go to a court if they have an objection. But this cat and mouse game with authorities needs to be shut down much more aggressively.
[+] [-] whatsu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
There's 195 nations on this planet. Should every company lower themselves below every nation? Without question? There's far more provinces with some lawmaking capability. How logistically do we even begin to figure out how to obey each & every single local rule?
These nations are on the internet. It's an unplace to connect all places. If your area has stupid beef, it's on you to handle your shit & make it so. The whole world doesn't bend to your local rules, it doesn't alter the rules of the entire internet.
[+] [-] alwayslikethis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Georgelemental|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HideousKojima|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0xy|2 years ago|reply
This is a really weak defeatist position.
Brazil's administration is attempting to silence opposition voices, this has nothing to do with Nazis. Much like the EU uses "hate speech" laws to silence mass immigration skeptics, this is a political measure to silence people.
[+] [-] eviks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rafaelrc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skrowl|2 years ago|reply
It's not even clear that who they were looking for had broken any laws