Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot | Songs on the Security of Networks

I used Telegram for a bit due to the broad usage in Ukraine and then to explore it as a platform. I even had a Weekly Thing channel on it for a few weeks. I didn’t like a number of things about the service and ultimately decided to stop using it. This article goes deeper on many issues with it.

IStories found evidence that all network communication to and from Telegram's infrastructure go through a company linked to the Russian FSB. This would provide the kind of network visibility that combined with auth_key_id would allow it to identify traffic coming from specific users, globally.

In other words, what for years seemed like a protocol design oddity is now looking more like a deliberate decision to facilitate global surveillance of all Telegram users by the Russian state, while obscuring Telegram's infrastructure provider's role and providing some measure of plausible deniability for Telegram itself.

The Internet can seem like a different place without country boundaries, but those packets, servers, and bits have to physically be some place.