“SimpleX, at its core, is designed to be truly distributed with no central server. This allows for enormous scalability at low cost, and also makes it virtually impossible to snoop on the network graph,” Poberezkin wrote in a company blog post published in 2022.
SimpleX’s policies expressly prohibit “sending illegal communications” and outline how SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.
Argentino wrote in his analysis that discussion about moving from Telegram to platforms with better security measures began in June, with discussion of SimpleX as an option taking place in July among a number of extremist groups. Though it wasn’t until September, and the Terrorgram arrests, that the decision was made to migrate to SimpleX, the groups are already establishing themselves on the new platform.
“The groups that have migrated are already populating the platform with legacy material such as Terrorgram manuals and are actively recruiting propagandists, hackers, and graphic designers, among other desired personnel,” the ISD researchers wrote.
However, there are some downsides to the additional security provided by SimpleX, such as the fact that it is not as easy for these groups to network and therefore grow, and disseminating propaganda faces similar restrictions.
“While there is newfound enthusiasm over the migration, it remains unclear if the platform will become a central organizing hub,” ISD researchers wrote.
And Poberezkin believes that the current limitations of his technology will mean these groups will eventually abandon SimpleX.
“SimpleX is a communication network rather than a service or a platform where users can host their own servers, like in OpenWeb, so we were not aware that extremists have been using it,” says Poberezkin. “We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance. We do not think it is technically possible to create a social network of a meaningful size in the SimpleX network.”
The US government recently announced multiple charges against the alleged leaders of the “Terrorgram Collective,” which does just what it sounds like—it promotes terrorism on the Telegram messaging platform. In this case, the terrorism was white racial terror, complete with a “hit list” of US officials and activists, a homemade “White Terror” video glorifying “saints” who had killed others, and instructions for taking down US infrastructure such as electrical substation transformers. (Read the indictment.)
Chaos was the point. Terrorgram promoted “white supremacist accelerationism,” which believes that society must be incited into a civil war or apocalyptic confrontation in order to bring down the existing system of government and establish a white nationalist state.
The group’s manifestos and chat rooms sometimes felt suffused with the habits of the extremely online: hand-clap emojis between every important word, instructional videos on how to make bombs, the language of trolling, catchphrases so over the top they sound ironic (“HAIL HOLY TERROR” in all caps).
Despite using technology to organize and publicize its ideology, though, the group was skeptical of technology—or at least of certain kinds. “Do not let those technophiles have a day of rest!” said one post encouraging its readers to go after the local power grid.
“LEAVE. YOUR. PHONE. AT. HOME,” said another. “Death to the grid. Death to the System,” concluded a third. The group’s accelerationist manifesto was called “Hard Reset.”
Enlarge/ An “encyclopedia” of killers, produced by Terrorgram.
But they were apparently happy to use other tech to spread the word. One Terrorgram publication was called “Do it for the Gram,” and Terrorgram admins created audiobooks of shooter manifestos, such as “A White Boy Summer to Remember.”
But Telegram, which combines the wider reach of channels and chat rooms (unencrypted) with the possibility of direct messaging (which can be encrypted), was a favorite spot for recruiting and sharing information. According to the government, Dallas Humber (34) of Elk Grove, California, and Matthew Allison (37) of Boise, Idaho, were the leaders of Terrorgram, which they appear to have run out in the open.
The group constantly encouraged violence, and it stressed the need for attackers to mentally prepare themselves to kill so as not to chicken out. But neither Humber nor Allison are accused of violence themselves; they seem to have been content to cheer on new martyrs to their cause.
The government traces several real-world killers to the Terrorgram community, including a 19-year-old from Slovakia who, in 2022, killed two people at an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava before sending his manifesto to Allison and then killing himself in a park. The manifesto specifically listed “Hard Reset” in its “Recommended Reading” section.
Enlarge/ Pavel Durov, CEO and co-founder of Telegram, speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2015 on September 21, 2015, in San Francisco, California.
Getty Images | tSteve Jennings
After the arrest of Telegram CEO and co-founder Pavel Durov in France over the weekend, his detention was extended for up to four days while a judge decides whether he should face criminal charges.
“The detention of Durov, 39, was extended beyond Sunday night by the investigating magistrate who is handling the case, according to a source close to the investigation,” Le Monde reported. “This initial period of detention for questioning can last up to a maximum of 96 hours. When this phase of detention ends, the judge can then decide to free him or press charges and remand in further custody.”
Telegram “is accused of failure to cooperate with law enforcement over drug trafficking, child sexual content and fraud,” the BBC wrote. Telegram yesterday said it “abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act,” and that the platform’s “moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving.”
“Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe,” the company said. “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform. Almost a billion users globally use Telegram as means of communication and as a source of vital information. We’re awaiting a prompt resolution of this situation.”
Durov’s arrest warrant was issued by “France’s OFMIN, an office tasked with preventing violence against minors,” Le Monde wrote. The warrant is reportedly related to “a preliminary investigation into alleged offenses including fraud, drug trafficking, cyberbullying, organized crime, and promotion of terrorism.”
Reuters wrote that a police spokesman told the news agency “that Durov is under investigation by the national cyber crime and fraud offices for failing to cooperate over cyber and financial crimes on Telegram.” The New York Times reported that “Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, said in a statement that the arrest was part of an investigation opened on July 8 ‘against person unnamed’ on a raft of potential charges, including complicity in the distribution of child pornography and selling of drugs, money laundering, and a refusal to cooperate with law enforcement.”
The statement from Beccuau was released by French authorities in both French and English. It says Durov was questioned as part of an investigation into this “person unnamed.” The accusations against the unnamed person also include “web-mastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group,” and “refusal to communicate, at the request of competent authorities, information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law.”
Three of the charges being investigated are related to encryption, the French press release said. These include “providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration,” “providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration,” and “importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.”
Macron: Arrest not a political decision
Durov was born in Russia and also has citizenship in the United Arab Emirates and France. Telegram is based in the UAE.
The Russian embassy in France reportedly said it “immediately asked French authorities to explain the reasons for this detention and demanded that [Durov’s] rights be protected and that consular access be granted. Up to now, the French side is refusing to cooperate on this question.”
French President Emmanuel Macron wrote today that the French judicial system is acting independently. “The arrest of the Telegram president on French territory took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation,” he wrote, according to a Google translation. “This is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to decide.” Macron also wrote that France is committed to “freedom of expression and communication.”
Telegram offers a mix of private messaging and social network features. It lets users create groups of up to 200,000 people, and its Channels feature allows the posting of public messages to audiences of any size. Telegram messages do not have end-to-end encryption by default, but the extra level of security can be enabled for one-on-one conversations.
“If you want to use end-to-end encryption in Telegram, you must manually activate an optional end-to-end encryption feature called ‘Secret Chats‘ for every single private conversation you want to have,” Matthew Green, a Johns Hopkins University professor and cryptographer, wrote. “The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them.”
Pavel Durov, Telegram founder and former CEO of Vkontakte, in happier (and younger) days.
Late this afternoon at a Parisian airport, French authorities detained Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messaging/publication service. They are allegedly planning to hit him tomorrow with serious charges related to abetting terrorism, fraud, money laundering, and crimes against children, all of it apparently stemming from a near-total lack of moderation on Telegram. According to French authorities, thanks to its encryption and support for crypto, Telegram has become the new top tool for organized crime.
The French outlet TF1 had the news first from sources within the investigation. (Reuters and CNN have since run stories as well.) Their source said, “Pavel Durov will definitely end up in pretrial detention. On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of offenses and crimes to be committed, which he does nothing to moderate nor does he cooperate.”
Durov is a 39-year-old who gained a fortune by building VKontakte, a Russian version of Facebook, before being forced out of his company by the Kremlin. He left Russia and went on to start Telegram, which became widely popular, especially in Europe. He was arrested today when his private plane flew from Azerbaijan to Paris’s Le Bourget Airport.
Telegram has become a crucial news outlet for Russians, as it is one of the few uncensored ways to hear non-Kremlin propaganda from within Russia. It has also become the top outlet for nationalistic Russian “milbloggers” writing about the Ukraine war. Durov’s arrest has already led to outright panic among many of them, in part due to secrets it might reveal—but also because it is commonly used by Russian forces to communicate.
As Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted tonight, “A popular Russian channel says that Telegram is also used by Russian forces to communicate, and that if Western intelligence services gain access to it, they could obtain sensitive information about the Russian military.”
Right wing and crypto influencers are likewise angry over the arrest, writing things like, “This is a serious attack on freedom. Today, they target an app that promotes liberty tomorrow, they will go after DeFi. If you claim to support crypto, you must show your support #FreeDurov it’s time for digital resistance.”
Durov appears to be an old-school cyber-libertarian who believes in privacy and encryption. His arrest will certainly resonate in America, which has seen a similar debate over how much online services should cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI, for instance, has occasionally warned that end-to-end encryption will result in a “going dark” problem in which crime simply disappears from their view, and the US has seen repeated attempts to legislate backdoors into encryption systems. Those have all been defeated, however, and civil liberties advocates and techies generally note that creating backdoors makes such systems fundamentally insecure. The global debate over crime, encryption, civil liberties, and messaging apps is sure to heat up with Durov’s arrest.
The US Department of Justice has started cracking down on the use of AI image generators to produce child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
On Monday, the DOJ arrested Steven Anderegg, a 42-year-old “extremely technologically savvy” Wisconsin man who allegedly used Stable Diffusion to create “thousands of realistic images of prepubescent minors,” which were then distributed on Instagram and Telegram.
The cops were tipped off to Anderegg’s alleged activities after Instagram flagged direct messages that were sent on Anderegg’s Instagram account to a 15-year-old boy. Instagram reported the messages to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which subsequently alerted law enforcement.
During the Instagram exchange, the DOJ found that Anderegg sent sexually explicit AI images of minors soon after the teen made his age known, alleging that “the only reasonable explanation for sending these images was to sexually entice the child.”
According to the DOJ’s indictment, Anderegg is a software engineer with “professional experience working with AI.” Because of his “special skill” in generative AI (GenAI), he was allegedly able to generate the CSAM using a version of Stable Diffusion, “along with a graphical user interface and special add-ons created by other Stable Diffusion users that specialized in producing genitalia.”
After Instagram reported Anderegg’s messages to the minor, cops seized Anderegg’s laptop and found “over 13,000 GenAI images, with hundreds—if not thousands—of these images depicting nude or semi-clothed prepubescent minors lasciviously displaying or touching their genitals” or “engaging in sexual intercourse with men.”
In his messages to the teen, Anderegg seemingly “boasted” about his skill in generating CSAM, the indictment said. The DOJ alleged that evidence from his laptop showed that Anderegg “used extremely specific and explicit prompts to create these images,” including “specific ‘negative’ prompts—that is, prompts that direct the GenAI model on what not to include in generated content—to avoid creating images that depict adults.” These go-to prompts were stored on his computer, the DOJ alleged.
Anderegg is currently in federal custody and has been charged with production, distribution, and possession of AI-generated CSAM, as well as “transferring obscene material to a minor under the age of 16,” the indictment said.
Because the DOJ suspected that Anderegg intended to use the AI-generated CSAM to groom a minor, the DOJ is arguing that there are “no conditions of release” that could prevent him from posing a “significant danger” to his community while the court mulls his case. The DOJ warned the court that it’s highly likely that any future contact with minors could go unnoticed, as Anderegg is seemingly tech-savvy enough to hide any future attempts to send minors AI-generated CSAM.
“He studied computer science and has decades of experience in software engineering,” the indictment said. “While computer monitoring may address the danger posed by less sophisticated offenders, the defendant’s background provides ample reason to conclude that he could sidestep such restrictions if he decided to. And if he did, any reoffending conduct would likely go undetected.”
If convicted of all four counts, he could face “a total statutory maximum penalty of 70 years in prison and a mandatory minimum of five years in prison,” the DOJ said. Partly because of “special skill in GenAI,” the DOJ—which described its evidence against Anderegg as “strong”—suggested that they may recommend a sentencing range “as high as life imprisonment.”
Announcing Anderegg’s arrest, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco made it clear that creating AI-generated CSAM is illegal in the US.
“Technology may change, but our commitment to protecting children will not,” Monaco said. “The Justice Department will aggressively pursue those who produce and distribute child sexual abuse material—or CSAM—no matter how that material was created. Put simply, CSAM generated by AI is still CSAM, and we will hold accountable those who exploit AI to create obscene, abusive, and increasingly photorealistic images of children.”
Enlarge/ Building of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (France).
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that weakening end-to-end encryption disproportionately risks undermining human rights. The international court’s decision could potentially disrupt the European Commission’s proposed plans to require email and messaging service providers to create backdoors that would allow law enforcement to easily decrypt users’ messages.
This ruling came after Russia’s intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service (FSS), began requiring Telegram to share users’ encrypted messages to deter “terrorism-related activities” in 2017, ECHR’s ruling said. A Russian Telegram user alleged that FSS’s requirement violated his rights to a private life and private communications, as well as all Telegram users’ rights.
The Telegram user was apparently disturbed, moving to block required disclosures after Telegram refused to comply with an FSS order to decrypt messages on six users suspected of terrorism. According to Telegram, “it was technically impossible to provide the authorities with encryption keys associated with specific users,” and therefore, “any disclosure of encryption keys” would affect the “privacy of the correspondence of all Telegram users,” the ECHR’s ruling said.
For refusing to comply, Telegram was fined, and one court even ordered the app to be blocked in Russia, while dozens of Telegram users rallied to continue challenging the order to maintain Telegram services in Russia. Ultimately, users’ multiple court challenges failed, sending the case before the ECHR while Telegram services seemingly tenuously remained available in Russia.
The Russian government told the ECHR that “allegations that the security services had access to the communications of all users” were “unsubstantiated” because their request only concerned six Telegram users.
They further argued that Telegram providing encryption keys to FSB “did not mean that the information necessary to decrypt encrypted electronic communications would become available to its entire staff.” Essentially, the government believed that FSB staff’s “duty of discretion” would prevent any intrusion on private life for Telegram users as described in the ECHR complaint.
Seemingly most critically, the government told the ECHR that any intrusion on private lives resulting from decrypting messages was “necessary” to combat terrorism in a democratic society. To back up this claim, the government pointed to a 2017 terrorist attack that was “coordinated from abroad through secret chats via Telegram.” The government claimed that a second terrorist attack that year was prevented after the government discovered it was being coordinated through Telegram chats.
However, privacy advocates backed up Telegram’s claims that the messaging services couldn’t technically build a backdoor for governments without impacting all its users. They also argued that the threat of mass surveillance could be enough to infringe on human rights. The European Information Society Institute (EISI) and Privacy International told the ECHR that even if governments never used required disclosures to mass surveil citizens, it could have a chilling effect on users’ speech or prompt service providers to issue radical software updates weakening encryption for all users.
In the end, the ECHR concluded that the Telegram user’s rights had been violated, partly due to privacy advocates and international reports that corroborated Telegram’s position that complying with the FSB’s disclosure order would force changes impacting all its users.
The “confidentiality of communications is an essential element of the right to respect for private life and correspondence,” the ECHR’s ruling said. Thus, requiring messages to be decrypted by law enforcement “cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society.”
Martin Husovec, a law professor who helped to draft EISI’s testimony, told Ars that EISI is “obviously pleased that the Court has recognized the value of encryption and agreed with us that state-imposed weakening of encryption is a form of indiscriminate surveillance because it affects everyone’s privacy.”
