Pavel Durov claimed on Twitter on Wednesday that US bureaus made two attempts to bribe his developers while they were on a one-week trip to the US last year. He also insisted that the FBI put pressure on him personally.
“During our team’s 1-week stay in the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our developers by US agencies and pressure on me from the FBI,” Durov wrote on Twitter. “It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure crypto app based in the US,” he added in another tweet.
Telegram is a messaging app that claims to have above 100 million active users. The company provides a secure place for people to talk in confidence over its “Secret Chats” feature that uses “end-to-end” encryption — an encryption method makes the information unreadable to anyone that isn’t the sender or the receiver.
Durov has also insisted that Signal, Telegram’s biggest rival, has been funded by the US government and that a backdoor is likely to develop within the next five years. This is not the first time that he’s made these false claims and his comments should be treated with caution. It goes without saying that it’s in his interest to talk up his own app above his rivals’.
Intelligence bureaus in the US, the UK, France, and other countries claim that they need tech companies like Telegram to stop using end-to-end encryption so that they can see conversations between suspected terrorists and other criminals. However, removing end-to-end encryption from communication platforms exposes them to hackers, who can potentially exploit any backdoor created for bureaus such as the NSA and GCHQ.
Weakening encryption is back on the UK government’s schedule following a recent flurry of terrorist attacks in the country. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said on the Andrew Marr Show in March it is “unacceptable” that terrorists were using apps like WhatsApp to cover their communications, and that there “should be no place for terrorists to hide.
“We need to make sure,” she continued, “that companies like WhatsApp — and there are plenty of others like that — don’t provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate.”
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