Telegram, which staunchly refuses to surrender encryption keys for all user exchanges, has appealed to the United Nations for support in their dispute with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). The instant messenger is represented by lawyers from Agora, a Russian human rights group, reports Meduza, a Russian and English language online publication based in Latvia.
In a letter to David Kaye, the UN’s special rapporteur on promoting and protecting the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Agora described the FSB’s demands as a “serious threat to freedom of expression.”
On December 12, a Russian court upheld an 800,000-ruble (approximately $13,500 at the current exchange rate) fine for ignoring FSB orders to turn over the encryption keys on all user correspondence, Meduza reports.
Telegram says this is technologically impossible, given that the service’s administrators themselves don’t have access to encryption keys, which are generated on users’ own devices. Telegram has compared its showdown with the FBI-Apple encryption dispute in 2015 and 2016, when the US company received and flouted a dozen government orders to unlock cryptographically protected mobile phones.
The court’s decision to fine Telegram for ignoring the FSB’s orders is sufficient legal grounds for Russia’s federal regulators to order Internet providers to begin blocking Telegram, notes Meduza.
Russia compared with Iran
In June this year Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, agreed for his firm to be registered in Russia after coming under pressure from the authorities to do so, but warned he will never surrender Telegram’s encryption keys to any government authorities.
As far as Russia is concerned, “we won’t comply with the unconstitutional ‘Yarovaya law’ and won’t give [the FSB] the encryption keys they want,” Durov wrote via his Telegram account in September, even if the authorities “seem to be unhappy” with that.
The young entrepreneur added on his Vkontakte page that he’s even ready to face a ban from his country. He compared Russia with Iran, where has been indicted for not sharing with the local authorities access to the data of 40 million Iranian Telegram users.
Adopted in 2016, the new Russian legislation (dubbed ‘Yarovaya law’ or ‘Big Brother law’) requires messenger apps and other “organizers of information distribution” to add “additional coding” to transmitted electronic messages so that Russia’s secret service decipher them.
