Joel Gehrke
Telegram, a leading encrypted messaging and social media application, has been compromised by Russia, according to a NATO-backed assessment.
“Telegram is not really as it used to be,” Janis Sarts, the director of NATO’s Strategic Communications Center of Excellence in Riga, Latvia, told the Washington Examiner. “I do have reasons to believe that there is not full integrity. ... Certainly, I would not see it as a secure platform.”
The messaging service, founded in Dubai by a Russian tech titan who has clashed with Russian President Vladimir Putin's surveillance apparatus, rocketed to global popularity in 2014 as one of the first applications to offer users the ability to communicate on an encrypted line. It proved valuable to Belarusian protesters who denounced President Alexander Lukashenko’s self-declared victory in a 2020 presidential election, but a warning about the program has begun to circulate among Western officials.
“I don't think it's fully safe,” he said.
Sarts hesitated to detail the basis for his doubts about the security of the platform, but he confirmed that his concerns apply to the reliability of the encryption, in addition to the disinformation risks. “The integrity of that platform is under the question, from my perspective," he said.
Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship agency, imposed a ban on the app in 2018 because of Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov's refusal to cooperate with "any request from the Russian [security] services," as he put it at the time. In 2021, the censors cited Durov's "stated readiness to counter terrorism and extremism" as a basis for lifting the ban, which they had struggled to implement.
"Telegram has never had a partnership in any form with the Russian government," Telegram spokesman Remi Vaughn told the Washington Examiner. "In fact, Telegram was banned there — a ban that was released because it proved ineffective in limiting the growth of Telegram."
That misgiving seems to continue a trend of social media companies headquartered in Russia or China proving vulnerable to authoritarian security services. Sarts, who cited the outpouring of international support for Ukraine on social media as an important factor for Ukrainian morale in the earliest days of the battle around Kyiv, regards the war in Ukraine as proof that Western democracies need to develop “standards” by which to regulate social media companies before Moscow or Beijing gains a new advantage in a future war.
“I'd say there has to be some kind of value judgment before they can become part of a global market,” he said. “For instance, if in five years, or seven, half of the social media is Chinese and the U.S. population is there [on that platform] and there’s a conflict, how then can you make sure that this value set upon which a company acts is free, fair treatment of information, the right of free speech?”
Sarts, a former senior Latvian defense official, does not speak for NATO directly. Yet his strategic communications organization is accredited by the security bloc and advises the alliance on “counternarrative strategies, narrative development, and assessment,” among other things.
"Telegram has no servers, companies, or developers in Russia," said Vaughn, the Telegram representative. "It has never been developed by a Russian company."
Durov touted Telegram as his effort “to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies.” Their prior project, VKontakte, a Russia-based equivalent to Facebook, was used by Ukrainians to distribute messages to Russian citizens in the earliest days of the war.
“And in about two weeks, there was a full control of that platform by Russian agencies,” he said.
Durov tried to assure Ukrainian users of Telegram's reliability in the weeks after Putin launched the offensive to overthrow Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenksy. He noted his mother's Ukrainian background and emphasized that he has a record of defying Russian spy agencies on behalf of Ukrainians.
"In 2013, the Russian security agency, FSB, demanded that I provide them the private data of the Ukrainian users of VK who were protesting against a pro-Russian president," Durov wrote in a March message on Telegram. "I refused to comply with these demands, because it would have meant a betrayal of our Ukrainian users. After that, I was fired from the company I founded and was forced to leave Russia."
Still, if Telegram seems more open than VK, Sarts cautioned, that may be because it is now the "central focal point for Russian disinformation."
"That is how they circumvent the blocks that the Facebooks, Instagrams, and others have made. So they operate through the Telegram groups and use them then to post the material [on] all other social media platforms,” he added.
His visit to Washington nearly coincided with a report that TikTok has failed to prevent employees at Beijing-based parent company ByteDance from accessing the data of American users.
“Everything is seen in China,” a TikTok employee said in one of several internal meetings about the issue, according to Buzzfeed, which obtained recordings of the discussions.
Those reported conversations stoke a suspicion that has simmered among U.S. policymakers regarding China’s ability to exploit TikTok for surveillance of U.S. users. The company also has been accused of complying with Russia’s ban on "fake news" about the war — a term defined, for purposes of Russian prosecutors, as encompassing criticism of the Russian military or statements of opposition to the war — while allowing Russian state media to air pro-war videos.
“We are deeply concerned that ... TikTok is enabling the spread of pro-war propaganda to the Russian public, which risks adding to an already devastating human toll for both Ukrainians and Russians,” Sen. Steve Daines (MT) wrote in a June 17 letter to TikTok signed by five other Senate Republicans. “Additionally, we remain concerned that TikTok’s broader disinformation and misinformation policies related to the Ukraine war are insufficient, fueling pro-war sentiment among TikTok users residing beyond Russia’s borders.”
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