Earlier this month, the Russian authorities lifted their ban on the telegram messaging app, referring to the company's willingness to help fight terrorism. Although the official ban has been in effect for over two years, telegrams are reported to have remained accessible most of the time in the country. In a new role, The Washington Post wrote as the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, "humiliated and maneuvered Russia's state telecommunications regulator" to prevent the app from being successfully banned. Not surprisingly, it's worth reading it in full.
The telegram initially caught the attention of the Russian authorities as it had reportedly become one of the preferred apps for the country's opposition groups. The authorities wanted access to the encrypted messages from the telegram users, but Durov was in no hurry to give up.
Two years ago, Pavel Durov refused to allow Russian security services access to users' encrypted messages in his popular telegram messaging app, which was a favorite of Russian opposition groups at the time. The authorities' response was either transmitted or deleted from the country's digital map.
Neither has happened.
The reason was that Telegram found ways around the regulator's firewalls. The traffic was forwarded via US cloud services from Amazon and Google and was not displayed. Combined with changing IP addresses, this meant that when Roskomnadzor, Russia's Internet censor, tried to block telegrams, other websites and services got caught in the crossfire, said Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and security services expert. However, this tactic turned out to be controversial for some companies:
"Telegram effectively created large platforms with many users – companies were hosted on them – hostages," said Soldatov, adding that the digital disruption raised awareness among ordinary users who may not even have been on Telegram.
"Opinions about the ethics of this tactic were divided," Soldatov said. “While digital activists praised it – it made the telegram a national and even international problem – the Russian companies hosted on Amazon were blocked due to Roskomnadzor's incompetence. And they accused Telegram, not the Russian authorities. "
This tactic has reportedly not worked in countries like Iran or China where Internet censorship efforts are more sophisticated, but they were sufficient to persuade the Russian authorities to stop trying to ban the telegram. Instead, government officials seemed to accept this in a strange twist.
Moscow's attempts to ban telegram had a very ironic twist – they were repeatedly undermined by government officials who continued to use it. The app eventually turned into another dissemination tool for government-sponsored news and propaganda.
The Washington Post Piece is a great look at what a relatively small service could achieve when it decided to stay online, and It is worth reading.
