🇺🇸🇸🇾 US and Syrian officials convened in Damascus to discuss lifting sanctions and potentially delisting Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as a terrorist organization. The US reportedly outlined conditions, including initiating a democratic political process and ensuring minority rights in Syria. Syrian newspaper Al Watan quoted a US official who described a separate meeting with HTS leader al-Julani as "useful and good."
🇺🇸🇸🇾 US and Syrian officials convened in Damascus to discuss lifting sanctions and potentially delisting Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) as a terrorist organization. The US reportedly outlined conditions, including initiating a democratic political process and ensuring minority rights in Syria. Syrian newspaper Al Watan quoted a US official who described a separate meeting with HTS leader al-Julani as "useful and good."
Telegram boasts 500 million users, who share information individually and in groups in relative security. But Telegram's use as a one-way broadcast channel — which followers can join but not reply to — means content from inauthentic accounts can easily reach large, captive and eager audiences. "Someone posing as a Ukrainian citizen just joins the chat and starts spreading misinformation, or gathers data, like the location of shelters," Tsekhanovska said, noting how false messages have urged Ukrainians to turn off their phones at a specific time of night, citing cybersafety. After fleeing Russia, the brothers founded Telegram as a way to communicate outside the Kremlin's orbit. They now run it from Dubai, and Pavel Durov says it has more than 500 million monthly active users. If you initiate a Secret Chat, however, then these communications are end-to-end encrypted and are tied to the device you are using. That means it’s less convenient to access them across multiple platforms, but you are at far less risk of snooping. Back in the day, Secret Chats received some praise from the EFF, but the fact that its standard system isn’t as secure earned it some criticism. If you’re looking for something that is considered more reliable by privacy advocates, then Signal is the EFF’s preferred platform, although that too is not without some caveats. Given the pro-privacy stance of the platform, it’s taken as a given that it’ll be used for a number of reasons, not all of them good. And Telegram has been attached to a fair few scandals related to terrorism, sexual exploitation and crime. Back in 2015, Vox described Telegram as “ISIS’ app of choice,” saying that the platform’s real use is the ability to use channels to distribute material to large groups at once. Telegram has acted to remove public channels affiliated with terrorism, but Pavel Durov reiterated that he had no business snooping on private conversations.
from us
