Pavel Durov: Telegram is not going to provide encryption keys to third parties
Photo: REUTERS / Dado Ruvic
Today Gosudma in the second and third reading voted for the adoption of a package of amendments by the authorship of the deputies Yarovaya and Ozerov. The change in legislation initiated by the amendments has far-reaching consequences for telecommunication companies operating in Russia. In particular, companies are now obliged to store all the data of their subscribers for many months. Messengers and social networks at the request of the authorities must provide the decoding keys to the encrypted correspondence of users.
Pavel Durov, the founder of the social network “Vkontakte” and the Telegram messenger, said today that he was not going to fulfill this requirement. He said that Telegram will not give out data or encryption keys to third parties, including the government, write"News". According to him, the laws that are adopted in various countries will not affect this decision in any way.
As for Russia, a fine of up to 1 million rubles is provided for refusing the requirement of the authorities to provide decoding keys.
However, the law does not provide for blocking a resource that refused to provide keys. This is evidenced by independent lawyer Anton Bogatov. In addition, he believes that it is almost impossible to fine a company that is not registered in Russia. “With him [with Pavel Durov - approx. Ed.] will fight sluggishly and say that he is “a bad person” - both he and Telegram, ”the lawyer said.
If you want to block the service is still possible, but experts believe that this is unlikely to be someone to do. For example, to block Telegram, you will need to add Apple and Google IP resources to the register of prohibited sites of Roskomnadzor. Namely - the directory of applications that host the program. In this case, some applications on the phones of Russian users will stop working altogether. If you demand that Apple or Google remove Telegram from directories, corporations may simply not listen to the authorities and not take such a step.
At the moment, all correspondence of Telegram users is encrypted. The data is stored on the servers of the service only in encrypted form. There is also the possibility of direct encryption. To enable this option, the user needs to enable the secret chat mode, after which messages will be transmitted between users in an encrypted form directly, bypassing the server. And in this case, Telegram will not be able to transmit the decrypted correspondence of users to the authorities even if Pavel Durov decides to cooperate with the law enforcement authorities of the Russian Federation.