John Stapleton
For once the advertising logo is correct. The headline grabbing mobile app Telegram promotes itself as a “new era of messaging”. It uses military grade encryption to ensure the privacy of communications. That it is one of the most popular programmes for jihadists and Islamic State supporters is for some beside the point. You might as well criticise the mujahedeen for driving cars.
For others it is entirely the point.
A new era of encryption products has created a nightmare for security agencies worldwide.
In recent months Islamic State have claimed responsibility for the Paris massacre, the shooting down of a Russian airline and other attacks on Telegram, as well as using it as a major propaganda tool.
A terror plot can be hatched without leaving a whisper in cyberspace. Messages can be set up to self destruct within a second, while end-to-end encryption combined with the use of a Virtual Private Network, which scatters IP addresses around the globe, ensures that the user cannot be traced and the communications cannot be decoded.
So confident is Telegram that its messaging cannot be decrypted, last year it began offering a $US300,000 reward for anyone who could do so. The prize remains unclaimed.
The company was founded two and a half years ago by Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov, who fell out with Vladimir Putin and are now based in Berlin.
This week the company announced that the number of messages delivered every day has topped 15 billion, it has 100 million active users worldwide in any given month and 350,000 new users sign up every day.
When asked if he was losing sleep knowing terrorists were using his platform, Pavel Durov is reported to have said: “The right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism.”
The Telegram app has been made even more appealing by the introduction of “channels” last September, which means anyone can broadcast anything they like to their chosen audience without revealing the identity or location of themselves or their followers.
Despite all the Australian government talk of making it more difficult to access Islamic State’s online propaganda, it takes only seconds, with the assistance of Google, to find the Islamic State Telegram channel English Nashir, under a banner displaying the Islamic State flag and logo and with the words: “Come Forth to Your State!”
If you do not have a Telegram account already interested parties are prompted to join.
There are also numerous links to online propaganda, from IS linked Twitter accounts to the latest copy of their expensively produced magazine Dabiq.
Once connected through Telegram, what people are watching, reading or listening to or who they are communicating with immediately becomes hidden from the authorities.
Technology expert and CEO of consulting firm Eye on the Future Morris Miselowski told The New Daily there was no solution.
“There is a dichotomy,” he said. “Consumers are screaming out for programs which can’t be hacked. We want the technology. we just don’t want the bad guys to use it.
“Humans will communicate, and we are increasingly doing it in digital spaces. We can’t yell at Telegram and Facebook, we might as well be yelling at humans for using it.”
Critics call apps such as Telegram the command and control centres of terrorism, while British Prime Minister David Cameron is pushing legislation through parliament stopping companies including Apple and Google from using encryption technology so sophisticated not even the companies themselves can decode it.
But many others warn against yet more futile legislation.
Laurie Patton, head of the peak body Internet Australia, told The New Daily that while they supported efforts to counter criminal activities, especially terrorism, knee-jerk reactions such as the Data Retention Act pushed through parliament by Tony Abbott were doomed to fail.
Ross Schulman, Senior Counsel for the Open Technology Institute in the US, told The New Daily that when it came to encryption the genie was already out of the bottle. “There is not much that can be done to stop the use of encryption, precisely because so much of these products are either open source, or produced by companies not within the jurisdiction of our various governments. Legal mandates are bad policy for privacy, commercial, and cyber security reasons, and are often times simply unenforceable.
“The rise in these types of apps can be put down to two forces: First is advances in technology and usability that make these sorts of tools more and more available and easier and easier to use. Second is a growing awareness among the public that our lives today are digital and lived largely online and on our phones. They are our digital homes, and people are seeking to protect these devices in the same way we all seek to protect our physical homes.”