Russia is trying to block Telegram, an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. The reason for blocking is that Telegram refused to provide keys to the authorities with which messages can be decrypted. Not for a specific case, but for listening into general traffic.

Asking for keys (even if technologically possible), to have a general backdoor is a very bad idea. It will always be misused by others. And yes, you do have something to hide. Your internet banking is encrypted, your VPN connection from home to your work computer is too. You use passwords on websites, mail accounts and your wifi. If you don’t have anything to hide, please leave your Facebook login details along with your banking details in the comments. I promise I won’t use them. The point isn’t whether I or government keep our promises (and I or government might not), it’s that others definitely won’t.

As a result of Telegram not providing the keys, Russia is now trying to block people from using it. This results in millions of IP addresses now being blocked, more than 1 IP address per the around 14 million users of Telegram in Russia. (Telegram reports about 200 million users globally per month). Because the service partly runs on servers of Amazon and Google data centers, and those are getting blocked. This impacts other services as well, who use the same data centers to flexibly scale their computing needs. The blocking attempts aren’t working though.

It shows how fully distributed systems are hard to stamp out, it will merely pop up somewhere else. The internet routes around damages, it is what it was designed to do.

Let’s see if actions will now be taken by Russian authorities against persons and assets of Telegram, as that really is the only (potential, not garantueed,) way to stamp out something: dismantling it. In the case of Telegram, a private company, there are indeed people and assets one could target. And Telegram is pledging to deploy those assets in resisting. Yet dismantling Telegram, even if successful and disregarding other costs and consequences for a government, defeats the original purpose of wanting to listen in to message traffic. Traffic will easily move into other encrypted tools, like Signal, while new even more distributed applications will also emerge in response.

Summary:

• General backdoors, bad idea, regardless of whether you can trust the one you give back door access to.
• Blocking is hard to do with distributed systems.
• If you don’t accept attempts to do either from data driven authoritarian governments, you need to accept the same objections to general back door access apply to other situations where you think the stated aim has more merit.
• Do use an encrypted messaging app, like Signal, as much as possible