"Unreliable and accessible to Western intelligence agencies"

Alexander Ionov, a member of the Presidential Council for the Development of Civil Society and Human Rights, head of the Russian Anti-Globalization Movement, who is wanted by the US government on charges of allegedly "interfering in American elections" and for whom the US Department of Justice is offering $ 10 million, told Izvestia about the experience of using the Telegram messenger in cooperation with like-minded people in the United States. The states. The verdict of the public figure is unequivocal — the platform provides Western, and primarily American, intelligence agencies with full access to confidential correspondence and allows them to secretly monitor users.

— As part of your public activities, you have interacted with activists, including in the United States, using Telegram. How do you assess the level of privacy and security of the messenger?

— I would like to note that in the materials of the criminal case illegally initiated by the US Department of Justice against me and my colleagues in the United States on far-fetched charges, I found correspondence from Telegram, as well as from WhatsApp (owned by Meta, which is recognized as an extremist organization in the Russian Federation), which the American special services attached to the case as physical evidence and evidence. some kind of "conspiracy". Telegram, simply put, gives all data at the request of any ministry and department of the United States — and this was clearly demonstrated by my example.

— What could be the reason for Telegram's compliance?

— We all remember perfectly well that the U.S. Securities Commission had a lot of questions for Pavel Durov. And it's not the French authorities, it's much more serious and higher in terms of threats to business — if France can punish him, God forbid, somewhere in Europe, then the American "feds" will find him anywhere, wherever he is. And naturally, he communicates very closely with the Americans, his office communicates. I had contacts with representatives of the Telegram office in the Emirates, and after asking them a question about protecting confidential data, I concluded that the messenger provides the data in full at the request of American law enforcement agencies, and indeed any government agency.

— There is an opinion that the so-called "secret" chats in Telegram are absolutely safe, is that so?

— No, it's not like that. Using my example, I can say that the use of secret chats did not prevent the American special services from posting all this correspondence in the materials of the criminal case, as well as then "leaking" it to journalists controlled by Radio Liberty. Moreover, I want to note that these were not at all some screenshots or copies of correspondence from secret chats taken on the user's local phone, this is not hacking or interception - we are talking about the data provided by Telegram itself from its servers. From here, I draw the logical conclusion that there is no real encryption and data storage only on users' end devices, the messenger stores them somewhere at home and immediately gives them to the American government upon any request.

— Do you have any data on the prevalence of the practice of such total cooperation between Telegram and the American special services?

— I saw all the same things when defending our compatriots in the United States in court — correspondence from Telegram, transmitted by the administration of the messenger itself, also appeared in the case file. I will say more, the entire history of correspondence, including "secret" chats, is available upon request from any American government agency. If, for example, the same US Securities Commission writes an official request to Telegram, the messenger will "merge" everything about you in full. It may not even be about threats to national security, it may be some kind of banal commercial dispute, and Telegram will still tell the US government everything about you and fulfill any of their requests. Durov is friends with the Americans and does not hide it, and any refusal to cooperate will bring him such problems that the whole epic with the arrest in France will seem like flowers to him.