Signal doesn’t have public groups/channels. Moderation obligations only apply to public dissemination. If I send an email to a private mailing list, the involved email providers have no obligation to moderate its contents.

Telegram does store chats and channels on servers. Signal doesn't. I wonder Durov managed to stay between Scylla and Charybdis that long.

No need to imagine: https://signal.org/bigbrother/

Signal always sounded like they have better lawyers and are not as antagonistic. Police work is not only about encryption. But a lot of it involves metadata. And you know, just booting bad actors from the platform.

They also don't have public groups with questionable material, as far as I know

Signal is also a lot smaller. Telegram has over 1B users, while Signal has 40M. These optics could just be a product of the size of the user base.

If I were Moxie Marlinspike I would not be traveling to Europe any time soon....

He isn’t Signal’s CEO anymore.

They are certainly already on Signal, but Signal has end-to-end encryption so cannot supply information other than meta information to authorities.

This would imply that just E2EEing everything would give you a free pass not to moderate anything, which seems very naive. I doubt the judges would care about their self-imposed technological limitations.

If I sell shovels, it's not a self-imposed techical limitation that I don't have a way to detect and prevent anyone from doing something illegal with a shovel. Even after the technological means exist to include an intetnet connected spy device in every shovel.

Secure message passing is no different. The "shovel", the thing one might sell, is just the application of some math which does something and not any of the infinite other things.

It's not a shovel he's selling. It's aching to hosting a gallery portraying disgusting crimes done to actual children. Digital or ink, Durov can't just go behind freedom of speech in this matter.

This isn't about Durov or Telegram, it's about "E2EEing everything would give you a free pass not to moderate anything, which seems very naive"

An e2e communication system is just a shovel, or a car, or a saw, or any other tool that does a specific thing for which there is any valid need, which there absolutely is. Thinking that there is any logically valid way around that is what is very naive.

I agree with you, but also sympathize with the technical issues of moderating encrypted information. Thinking a bit about it, there would need to be a global man in the middle or a requirement for all applications to decrypt/re-encrypt centrally for moderation.

Such global man in the middle could be abused by bad parties.

That's why the authorities ask for the squaring of the circle.

Don't break encryption but make it readable.

That's "Let's make PI = 3" level of ignorance

But that would mean killing E2EE completely.

There's a difference between breaking the encryption of a single target after a warrant or handing over previous data which would need some kind of backdoor in the encryption.

I think the difference is that Signal can't provide the data but Telegram could but didn't want to.