What a fucking horseshit excuse for law enforcement.
Encrypted communication should be a human right.
The issue I see with Telegram is that they retain a certain control over the content on their platform, as they have blocked channels in the past. That’s unlike for example Signal, which only acts as a carrier for the encrypted data.
If they have control over what people are able to share via their platform, the relevant laws should apply, imho.
What has encryption got to do with it?
Most of telegram is not encrypted. There are unencrypted channels on telegram right now hosting child pornography. Telegram never removes them.
Good. They shouldn’t.
Unencrypted channels are the ones that are easiest to trace, and the easiest ones to successfully base a prosecution on.
The most correct response is to report them to law enforcement. Unencrypted channels make amazingly effective honeypots. It’s fairly easy to bust people using unencrypted channels, esp. because people think they’re anonymous and safe. It’s much, much harder to bust people once they move to .onion sites and the real dark net away from their phone. When you shut down all the easy channels, you push people into areas where it’s much harder, almost impossible, to root them out.
Look, if you’re going to knowingly host child porn, and not take it down even after you have been made aware, you get what’s coming to you.
The idea that Telegram would somehow better serve their customers by staging law enforcement stings in unencrypted channels is completely divorced from Telegram’s core mission.
This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or the right to encrypt. Child Pornography is a criminal matter. Failure to cooperate with law enforcement while providing comms and distribution to child pornographers is going to land you in deep shit eventually.
What if telegram refuses to cooperate with law enforcement in a timely fashion to provide details of the people sharing that material? What should law enforcement do then?
No. You can say that about so many laws being made, but telegram simply hosts the most vile shit.
The ISP will absolutely cooperate with law enforcement though, unlike telegram. That seems the nature of the issue in that there is a lack of moderation and oversight, which anonymity is not mutually-exclusive from flagging nefarious activities, ideally. I REALLY am not too keen on giving safe harbor to the likes of pedos and traffickers and what have you.
