Key points:
Russian-born IT entrepreneur Pavel Durov said that he was “pressured” by the FBI during his stays in America
The US government had wanted a backdoor to Telegram in order to potentially spy on its users, the social media platform’s founder Pavel Durov said in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson. The attention from the FBI was one of the reasons Durov dropped the idea of setting up the company in San Francisco, he said.
In an interview published on Wednesday, Durov said that he visited the US several times and even met with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He was under the watchful eye of the FBI, which made his stays in America uneasy, he said.
According to Durov, one of his top employees once told him that he had been approached by the US government. “There was a secret attempt to hire my engineer behind my back by cybersecurity officers,” the businessman said.
“They were trying to persuade him to use certain open-source tools that he would then integrate into Telegram’s code that, in my understanding, would serve as backdoors,” Durov said. He added that he believes the employee’s account. “There is no reason for my engineer to make up (such) stories.”
Extremely alarming that there is a claim here certain open-source tools act as back-doors for the western intelligence agencies but it makes perfect sense. Engineered bugs in upstream libraries and tools used by tons of commercial and open source software would always get you your best bang for the buck compromising lots of things. Unlike for example the recent xz debacle I expect these are likely much more well hidden and engineered to hide their nature as nothing but mistakes. There are multiple ways to accomplish this from having NSA/GCHQ employees working directly on these projects as core contributors to paying off or blackmailing core contributors.
I expect this particular revelation to likely be ignored by many of the usual privacy people and spaces just because Tucker Carlson (who has grown funnily more hated for interviewing Putin than anything else he's done among liberals) was the interviewer and of course because Durov is a Russian.
If the Chinese played dirty with hardware implants or baked in at the factory malware or hard-coded credentials we'd have a smoking gun by now. The US or one of its top cybersecurity companies (are stacked to the gills by the way with "former" NSA/CIA/FBI people) would have exposed such a thing, it would be on NBC and CNN, they'd have an extensive break-down, they'd have pictures of the chip in question or at least the standard industry publishing of a breakdown of the modules, names, fact they had to come from the factory, etc. Yet we don't have that. In a supposedly open, supposedly democratic society (nonsense of course) we don't have that.
You say the data is worth too much. It's no good if you get caught though. That's the rule of all spying. Only the US is actually insulated from consequences and had a head start, they had a massive technical advantage on their enemies.
Look at the sanctions the US can slap on countries, the massive economic punishment, the devastation to their market-shares they could inflict and have inflicted on Russia for the war for example and are inflicting on China without evidence.
US had all the reasons and means. They had dominance of high technology, it was use them and their compromised European allies who were eyes agreements partners or live in the dirt. There was no choice, they had everyone over the barrel of a gun so even if they had been caught for a long time the risk was minimal. Chinese and Russian companies exist in the context of intense competition with the west and always have, trying to claw their way up for market-share.
You are propagandized.
I think the Russians would play dirtier if they could but they can't. Material reality (the reality you liberals choose to ignore for your idealism infused fantasies constructed purely out of their projectionist propaganda designed to equivocate on their uniquely violating actions) constrains and limits them, threatens them, controls them. Something that doesn't apply to an empire like the US that after the collapse of the USSR was THE global hegemon and we know constructed the eyes agreements, we know applies pressure, we know blackmails, bribes, utilizes friendly intelligence agencies for full spectrum dominance.
The Chinese and Russians are regional players, they have interests in regional security and power. The US is the hegemon that cannot settle for most of the world it must have it all because that is the nature of capitalist greed, some is never enough, it must always be more and any competitor anywhere is always a threat to greater profits.
I am not a liberal. We are all "propagandized". China intimidates it's dissidents in other countries. The US hunts its dissidents also all over the world. Russia murders it's turned spies wherever they are.
The only losers in this game are us.
Attempting to elevate some kind of general anti-government position as more important than the issue of imperialism and colonialism is not going to liberate people.
But it will make comfortable smug white westerners feel better about their own laziness and lack of morality.