Pavel Durov’s messaging app is staring down the FSB over privacy
TELEGRAM, a sleek online messaging service founded in 2013, has 200m users worldwide. About 15m of them are in Russia, the homeland of its founder, Pavel Durov. Russia’s business and political elite have taken to its anonymous “channel” feature to dish out insider gossip. Even the Kremlin has adopted it to communicate with reporters.
But along with user-friendliness, Telegram has built its brand on privacy. Russian authorities are not pleased. The Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, has demanded that Telegram obey a law requiring firms to hand over the cryptographic “keys” needed to access encrypted messages. Mr Durov has refused. His lawyer posted a picture of two metal keys he joked had been sent to the FSB. Last week a court ruled against Telegram. Roskomnadzor, the communications authority, announced it would block the service from April 16th. The government urged reporters to switch to ICQ, a service owned by a Kremlin-friendly billionaire.
Roskomnadzor has blocked more than 19m IP addresses. Many belong to Google or Amazon, whose cloud services Telegram began using to bypass the ban. The agency’s head, Aleksandr Zharov, called it a “battle between shells and armour”. Many unrelated businesses have been caught in the crossfire, including Odnoklassniki, a social network; Viber, a messaging app; and online retailers and gaming platforms. The Kremlin Museum even reported problems with online ticket sales.
For many users Telegram has remained accessible, moving to new hosts each time Roskomnadzor blocks it. Others have defiantly switched to VPN services to maintain access. “They’re blocking Telegram because we created life here: we joke, lament, laugh, reflect, and discuss,” wrote a popular Telegram channel called Stalingulag. Mr Durov, who founded VK, Russia’s equivalent of Facebook, before emigrating, says Telegram has seen no significant drop in engagement. TGStat, a monitoring group, reckons that during the first day of the block, views of Russian-language Telegram channels were actually 17% higher.
Activists see the episode as a big escalation of the Russian state’s assaults on internet freedom. Russia has no equivalent of China’s automatic “great firewall”—it updates its blacklists manually—but such a possibility is “growing ever closer”, wrote Sarkis Darbinyan of Roskomsvoboda, a digital-rights group. The law requires companies to store Russian users’ data in Russia, but the government has mainly ignored Western companies that do not. That could change. Mr Zharov says if Facebook does not comply by the end of the year, it may be blocked, too.