Telegram app back on in Brazil after judge lifts suspension

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RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — The Telegram messaging app was up and running in Brazil on Saturday after a federal judge revised an earlier ruling suspending it over the company’s failure to hand over data on neo-Nazi activity.

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But in lifting the suspension, the judge kept in place a daily fine of $1 million reais (about $200,000) for Telegram’s refusal to provide the data, according to a press statement provided by the federal court that issued the ruling.

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Complete suspension “is not reasonable, considering the wide affectation throughout the national territory of the freedom of communication of thousands of people who are absolutely strangers to the facts under investigation,” judge Flavio Lucas was quoted as saying in the statement.

Telegram had been temporarily suspended in the context of a police inquiry into school shootings in November, when a former student armed with a semiautomatic pistol and wearing a bulletproof vest fatally shot three people and wounded 13 after barging into two schools in the small town of Aracruz in Espirito Santo state.

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The 16-year-old is believed to have been a member of extremist groups on Telegram, where tutorials on murder and the manufacture of bombs were disseminated, the court’s statement said.

The Federal Police ordered Telegram to provide details on names, tax identity numbers, profile photos, bank information and registered credit cards, among other things.

The messaging app has not delivered the registration data of the channel members, saying the extremist group had been suspended and therefore it was unable to provide the information. Police maintain the group was active on Telegram when the request was formalized, the court statement said.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said Thursday that the company would appeal the decision blocking access to its platform in Brazil, claiming in a statement posted to his Telegram account that compliance was “technologically impossible.”

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The company says it has never shared data on users with any government.

People need only a phone number to sign up for a Telegram account and they can use a pseudonym. Further, beginning in December, Telegram offered the option of creating accounts with anonymous numbers

The court statement noted Telegram’s “past clashes with the judiciary” in Brazil. Last year, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes ordered a nationwide shutdown of Telegram, arguing it hadn’t cooperated with authorities.

“Technology companies need to understand that cyberspace cannot be a free territory, a different world (…) with its own rules created and managed by the agents who commercially exploit it,” Lucas, the judge in the current case, said in Saturday’s statement.

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Brazil has been grappling with a wave of school attacks. There have been almost two dozen attacks or violent episodes in schools since 2000, half of them in the last 12 months, including the killing of four children at a day care center April 5.

Brazil’s federal government has strived to stamp out school violence with a particular focus on the influence of social media. The goal is to prevent further incidents, particularly holding platforms responsible for failing to remove content that allegedly incites violence.

Regulation of social media platforms was a recurring theme earlier this month when President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva met with his Cabinet ministers, Supreme Court justices, governors and mayors.

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Telegram has been blocked in the past by other governments, including Iran, China and Russia, while in the latter country Kremlin partisans have also employed it as a digital force to support President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Because Telegram is so loosely moderated, it has become extremely popular with outlaws.

Security researchers and intelligence agencies regularly track certain Telegram groups, focusing on ransomware gangs and other cybercriminals, so-called “patriotic hackers” allied with Russia’s government, disinformation purveyors, terrorist groups and others inciting violence.