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Telegram, the FSB, and the Man in the Middle


The technical infrastructure that underpins Telegram is controlled by a man whose companies have collaborated with Russian intelligence services. An investigation by IStories

Created by Durov in 2006, when he was just 21 years old, the site quickly earned a large userbase because it duplicated many of Facebook’s popular features and provided free access to vast troves of pirated music and videos. “Armed policemen [came] to my house, tried to break in because I refused,” he told right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson in an interview last year, explaining that this episode gave him the idea of creating a new, more secure messaging service. “If someone has access to Telegram traffic and cooperates with Russian intelligence services, this means that the device identifier becomes a really big problem — a tool for global surveillance of messenger users, regardless of where they are and what server they connect to.”

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