Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot

States the information is in cleartext but then explains how everything is encrypted (in transit).

That's not how I understood it. The message context is allways encrypted in transit (using a novel encryption scheme). The auth_key_id however is not encrypted. And that can be used to track users as it is s(semi-)static.

That's not what I understood from the post, but could you point to the specifics of what you're talking about in regards to the identifier being encrypted in transit? It seems the ID is sometimes obfuscated, but that is trivial to remove and not meant for security as mentioned.

Russia bad btw.

This is way more different thing than claiming and proving that Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot.

I did not claim nor attempt to prove that "Telegram is somehow FSB honeypot". I did claim and I believe I showed that it is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot. If you're nit-picking, at least nit-pick the correct claims, instead of some straw-man version of what I wrote that happens to be easier to attack. 😼

Yes, OCCRP received funding from USAID. They put that information very clearly on their own website. Here's a crazy thought: investigative journalism needs to be funded somehow, and USAID was one of the ways this could be done. If you have a better idea of how to fund investigative journalism, there is a lot of media outlets that would love to hear from you!

The way OCCRP was/is funded does not say anything about the veracity of their reporting. Or that of IStories, which was done independently of OCCRP (that's an important bit that most people miss).

What does speak to the veracity of reporting is the fact that over a decade and a half of reporting on stuff like this OCCRP has been sued by oligarchs multiple times in the most oligarch-friendly jurisdiction out there, UK (specifically, London), and have not lost a single time. Will Telegram sue OCCRP or IStories? Perhaps. Will they win? I seriously doubt it.

If they do sue, the discovery will be hilarious. IStories folks are going to get access to all sorts of great documents, I'm sure. Can't wait for these to get published!

Speaking of documents, I like how you quote two random claims made in that OCCRP version of IStories article, and just decide to ignore the bit where Vedeneev claims, in actual court documents, that yes he has access to Telegram infrastructure. And how there are documents showing he owns GNM. And how there are documents showing he also signed documents on behalf of Telegram (hilariously, a document exists that he signed both on behalf of GNM and of Telegram). And how he co-owns or co-owned companies which are also co-owned by people directly connected to the FSB. And a bunch of other stuff.

But that doesn't fit your "US shill" hot take, so why mention any of that right? 😄

You might also want to read the Russian version of IStories story, for hard documentary evidence of Durov's connections to FSB:
https://www.istories.media/stories/2025/06/10/kak-telegram-svyazan-s-fsb/

On a personal note, it is so much joy to see all the hand-wavy pushback in this thread. Clearly the story hit a pain point somewhere. The funny thing is that if similar but much less substantiated claims were made about Signal here, there would be a frenzy of dunking on it as an "imperialist tool of surveillance". 🤡

Hi, author here. First of all, in that piece I don't happen to recommend using any specific piece of software. I mention Signal and WhatsApp for comparison, as tools that are considered similar, and yet avoid making the same weird protocol choices.

Secondly, if you have any proof that any specific communication tool is used to "spy" on people, I am sure I am not the only person who would love to hear about it. That's the only way we can keep each other safe online. Surely you wouldn't be making unsubstantiated claims and just imply stuff like that without any proof, would you?

And finally, I've spent a good chunk of time and expertise on analyzing Telegram's protocol before I made my claims. I provided receipts. I provided code. I explained in detail my testing set-up. You can yourself go and verify my results.

Instead, you claim it's "propaganda", while mischaracterizing what I say in that post. Classy!

I can't say I read the whole thing because the technical analysis went over my head, but I don't think we read the same conclusion

Conclusions

Based on the analysis of packet captures above, I believe it is clear that anyone who has sufficient visibility into Telegram’s traffic would be able to identify and track traffic of specific user devices. Including when perfect forward secrecy protocol feature is in use.

This would also allow, through some additional analysis based on timing and packet sizes, to potentially identify who is communicating with whom using Telegram.