The secret American origins of Telegram, the encrypted messaging app favored by ISIS

An encrypted communications app called Telegram has been in the news a lot recently, amid fears that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has adopted it as its preferred platform for messaging. On Nov 18, Telegram reportedly banned 78 ISIS-related channels, “disturbed” to learn how popular the app had become among extremists. Those extremists had used the app both to spread propaganda, according to an October report, and to crowdfund money for guns and rockets, according to Vocativ.

Telegram makes an obvious choice for both activities: In media interviews and on his Web site, the app’s founder -- Pavel Durov, often called the “Zuckerberg of Russia” -- has boasted that Telegram is technologically and ideologically unsurveillable. In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, however, questions have begun to emerge about how trustworthy Telegram actually is. Multiple cryptologists and security experts have claimed that Telegram is actually not all that secure: a flaw that may reflect the fact that Telegram wasn’t initially conceived as an encrypted messaging platform. On top of that, while Telegram is typically described as a highly principled, Berlin-based nonprofit, that hasn’t always been the case: Up until about a year ago, Telegram was an opaque web of for-profit shell companies -- mired in conflict and managed, in large part, from the United States.