Some thoughts about Telegram and anonymity
Those of us who are interested in digital rights can draw a few observations and make a few points about the ethical issues around the arrests of Pavel Durov and some of those involved in the riots that happened in Britain last month.
There were a few mentions in the Corporate Media of Telegram having been used as a method of communication among those who apparently instigated the riots - I've heard several conflicting accounts of what triggered them - and, more recently, Durov was arrested primarily because Telegram's moderation of what people shared was deemed inadequate. I believe both were related. The whole thing struck me as rather odd, because I only know a couple of people who use Telegram, and it doesn't seem that popular. But if it's true, it would mean that word of alternative messaging systems must get around quickly among those determined to evade censorship and mass surveillance.
I'm pretty much an absolutist on the issues of free expression, privacy and anonymity. A messaging system is either designed to protect users' anonymity and freedom of expression, or it's not. A messaging system either has strong end-to-end encryption, or it's already compromised. Technology is agnostic to a society's ethics, morality and whatever laws might be passed.
Undeniably there are people who abuse the right to free expression, privacy and anonymity, misuse the tools that were developed in good faith to protect those rights, and will engage in bad stuff behind anonymity (typically someone else's identity or IP address), but still... I believe there should exist tools that empower the oppressed to organise against an unjust regime.
What I envisage, in my thought experiments (because it's an area of academic interest) isn't quite the situation we currently have in the West. Most the people who were charged and convicted for what they published online, in the context of last month's riots, had either openly incited violence on FaceBook, on which everything may as well be public, or they weren't educated enough to demand legal representation and to recognise when a 'not guilty' plea might have been more appropriate. I think we'll see a lot more of that over the next several years.
When private, secure and anonymous communication is discussed, most people think of Telegram or Signal, and some even think of WhatsApp.
If I wanted a method of clandestine communication, I'd be wary of all three, for the single reason they require a cellphone number when registering an account. As far as I'm concerned, a platform that can't be used over Tor, with just a username, email address and password, isn't to be trusted. With Telegram, law enforcement only needs to examine one device to get all the messages and contacts for a group. If that's not enough, law enforcement could go to Telegram with a court order to disclose the cellphone number associated with whatever username(s), and I'm pretty convinced it's entirely possible to comply with that order. Is the same possible for Signal users? Perhaps.
There is another subset of problems around the fact common 'social media' and messaging platforms are centralised, which means users' must assume that everything they share, implictly and explicitly, is accessible to adversaries. One must assume there's a good chance the end-to-end encryption is compromised, that the service providers have access to everything being communicated, and that they have the means to identify users.
Many decentralised alternatives had been developed over the past 15 years or so, but they haven't gained traction. I think Mastodon is the best we have currently.