Don't Shoot the Messenger - a translation

After the recent terrorist attacks, government representatives around the world have again started demanding backdoors in messengers with end-to-end encryption. At the same time, journalists covering these statements also made their usual pile of mistakes. Thanks to these mistakes, I (Markus Ra, head of Telegram’s support team - trans. note) received many questions from puzzled Telegram users. So let’s clarify a few things.

How secure is my information in Telegram?

Telegram secret chats use end-to-end encryption. This means that no one, including Telegram, can decrypt the data exchanged by the participants of a conversation. To protect data outside secret chats, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in different data centers around the world, which are under the control of different legal entities and in different jurisdictions. The encryption keys are split into parts and are never stored in the same place as the information encrypted with them. As a result, forcing Telegram to hand over any information requires several court orders from different jurisdictions. Thanks to this infrastructure, neither a single state, nor a bloc of like-minded countries can interfere with your private conversations and freedom of expression. Telegram can be compelled to hand over information only if the issue turns out to be so serious and global that such an order gets approved in different legal systems around the world.

To date, Telegram has not handed over a single byte of user information to third parties, including governments.

But what about terrorists?

Let’s look at how terrorist organizations can use messengers and, more importantly, what we can do to hinder them.

Private messages

What people fear most is that terrorists will use apps offering encryption to secretly exchange messages for planning and coordinating their attacks. If you don’t try to understand the problem, it may seem tempting to simply ban end-to-end encryption to keep terrorists from exchanging secure messages. But the bitter truth is that this will not work. To achieve their goal, terrorists are ready to endure many hardships and deprivations. Including death. So if you ban the existing secure messengers or build backdoors into them, they will immediately resort to one of the following options:

1. Building their own apps. The technology for creating secure messengers is publicly available knowledge. These days anyone can build a messenger with end-to-end encryption. These newly minted apps will most likely lack many shiny features and will have to be installed manually, bypassing Apple iTunes and Google Play, but they will work. There are rumors that ISIS members have had their own app since January 2016.
2. Using a code language. Steganography is a fancy word for hiding information in plain sight. You can safely use public or wiretapped communication channels if only you and the recipient of the message know what “Uncle David is going to the store tomorrow” means.
3. Using other means of communication. You, as an ordinary user, would not want to buy a new phone, make a call, write one message and then throw the device in the trash. But that is exactly how the terrorists in Paris communicated to organize and carry out the ISIS attacks in Europe.

As you may have noticed, in many cases the terrorists did not even have to change anything. They already have very viable means as an alternative to secure messengers. On the other hand, you don’t. Ordinary people are not ready to deal with the problems of apps with poor usability, not to mention burner phones or secret languages for the sake of privacy. As a result, the only thing government backdoors will achieve is the return of mass surveillance and the leaking of your personal information to hackers or corrupt officials.¹

Public messages

But none of the above means that we cannot throw obstacles in the terrorists’ way. Another key goal of terrorists, for which they use mass communication services, is spreading their ideas and getting information about their attacks to the largest possible number of people. It is for exactly this reason that various kinds of terrorist organizations have recently started moving to social media like Twitter, Facebook and others to publish their content and threats. Telegram is unique in that it has channels - a tool for sending messages to an unlimited audience. Naturally, terrorists tried to use this tool to broadcast ISIS content. But, like other services, Telegram took measures to drive them off this public platform. Terrorist channels keep appearing - just as they do on other services. But complaints about them come in practically instantly and they are shut down within hours - long before they manage to attract anyone. And yet, no matter how hard Telegram and other services try, the terrorists have a very powerful ally that helps them spread their messages.

Painting a dire picture

What keeps terrorism alive is not the weapons the terrorists use and not the messages they exchange - they have a long history, rich in improvisation, in both areas. There is one element that truly fuels this phenomenon: the media.² And it is no secret that terrorist organizations invest large amounts of money in their coverage in the press. When you look at the numbers, any other causes of death and destruction (save, perhaps, for falling vending machines and the like) will eclipse terrorist attacks, however cruel and unjust they may be.

Cancer, heart disease, traffic accidents and even soap on the bathroom floor kill more people every day than terrorists do in any year you pick.

So the terrorists’ main task is to convince you that their outrageous acts matter more than the roughly 150,000 deaths that happen every day from other causes. They want to distort our perception, to make us feel danger comes precisely from them, and not from the huge number of other threats that surround us in reality. Unfortunately, the mass media eagerly focus their attention on terrorists. After all, alarming news brings many views and advertising money - especially when it contains gripping photos of the victims. This is how fear spreads on the wings of a press greedy for clicks and views, and is fanned by politicians eager to gain more power while bearing less responsibility.

Playing on fear

We must never forget that terrorist organizations are, first and foremost, hunting for our fear. They will do anything to make us feel unsafe in our own cities and homes. But we are very many, and they are too few for these attempts, however painful for the victims, to be anything more than a drop in the sea of natural dangers that we have learned to live with and cope with. We must not panic and become a victim of the various forces that will exploit our fear of terrorism for their own purposes. Instead, we should help comfort and support the victims and their families - especially if we are somehow connected to them, however unlikely that may be.

And we must always remember that terrorists fight for our minds within our minds. In the end, victory depends precisely on us.

A translation of the post by Markus Ra, head of Telegram’s support team.