Pavel Durov and the Blackberry Ratchet

Then one summer the emperor’s alchemists discovered a way to get radio vapors to pass through sheet metal, unabated. They kept their discovery top secret and patched their mind reading machines with the new technology. Once again the emperor could hear everyone’s thoughts and it no longer mattered if you were wearing a tinfoil hat or not.

Now that his problem had gone away, was the emperor so naive as to have his lawyers — expensive lawyers — stop their litigation against Big Foil? Should he pretend he had changed his mind and everything was fine now? Maybe even peddle some “anti-mind reading” hats of his own?

That would be silly and very suspicious. In fact, the emperor was so paranoid of any suspicion arising that he increased the intensity of the crackdown on foil hats, even going so far as to arresting the CEO a popular hat maker when he flew into the country on business.

He wouldn’t outright ban foil of course. Not only could the emperor now read everyone’s minds, but by comparing the new machines output with the old he could tell who was wearing a secret layer of tinfoil under their hats. It was these people that had the most fiendish thoughts, thinking that no one was listening.

Strategic comms, soldier command and control, battlefield drone command and control, intel asset management.

Armchair analysts need to put on their big-boy military pants.

IMHO it's mainly due to the popularity of the service/product. The concentration of bad actors and the vastness of the audience/userbase make the difference. If Signal was used in the same way, it would get the same attention.

e2ee is just the bait. The telegram UI, ease of use and rich functions makes people stay.

In fact I find myself deosn't bother do one-to-one chats in telegram, mostly I just shitpost in groups like Discord channels. Signal is a fine e2ee chat app but that's it.

The use case of encrypted, secritive private one-to-one chats, especially outside work, is pretty limited.