Russia’s information regulator Roskomnadzor announced on Friday it would block Telegram unless it handed over information regarding the company that controlled Telegram, something it said Telegram had so far declined to do.
The FSB, the successor bureau to the Soviet-era KGB, added to that weight on Monday, releasing a statement which said Telegram provided “terrorists with the possibility to create secret chat rooms with a high degree of encryption.”
The FSB said a suicide bomber who blew himself up on the St Petersburg Metro on April 3, killing at a minimum of 15 people, had used Telegram to organize the attack with his accomplices, and that it was the extremely widely used app of its kind by terrorists operating on Russian soil.
Writing on social media, Telegram founder Pavel Durov stated on Monday that the communications regulator had also asked his organization to hand over the keys to allow the security services to decrypt user information in order to catch terrorists.
Durov said the order violated the constitutional right to have correspondence secret and was also technically impossible. If Russia banned Telegram, he told terrorists would simply switch to Telegram’s numerous competitors which also offered end-to-end encryption.
“If you want to defeat terrorism by blocking the web, you’ll have to block the Internet,” wrote Durov.
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