🇫🇷❌✉️ Telegram messages are not encrypted.

France is trying to arrest the CEO of a Russian team that has plaintext access to every message the French president has ever sent or received..

Telegram messages aren't e2e encrypted. It is also a "cloud messenger," meaning that all messages live on Telegram's servers rather than the user's device.

With one query, the Russian Telegram team can get every message the French president has ever sent or received to his contacts, every message those contacts have ever sent or received to their contacts, every message those contacts' contacts have ever sent or received, etc.

It's just plaintext, there are no limits to what they can do, like use an LLM to help go through all that material and pull out the dirt, map the relationships, figure out who's keeping secrets from who, etc.

For the French politicians and cabinet members, it is kind of too late to do anything. Even if they try to delete all their messages now, the Telegram team can just mark the messages as "deleted" so that they no longer display to the user -- but not actually delete the data they retain access to.

🔗 https://www.politico.eu/article/telegram-pavel-durov-arrest-emmanuel-macron-france-social-media/

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