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The most expensive piece of the Cold War that never ended is a building in central Vienna, and it's still on the clock. Russia's "Russencity" compound in Vienna, a nine-acre complex on the Danube, has SIGINT satellite dishes on its rooftops that face West. They reposition frequently. Vienna is optimally positioned for this, says @harkank in @FT. One large dish reoriented on the eve of the Munich Security Conference, Europe's main annual gathering of defence officials, then returned to its previous angle the day after the conference ended. Whoever is operating it had better conference prep than most attendees. The SIGINT station was commissioned in 1983. Andropov ran operations against dissidents, then ran the KGB, then ran the USSR, and also ordered a building. The building outlasted everything else. It is still working exactly as designed. Russia has around 500 diplomatic staff in Vienna, with up to a third suspected of being covert intelligence officers. Austria's own domestic intelligence agency warned in writing that the Russian SIGINT stations "pose a significant security risk".

Founder of @signalapp, @moxie Marlinspike on Telegram:   "Telegrams not a private messenger. There's nothing private about it. It's the opposite. It's a cloud messenger where every message you've ever sent or received is in plain text in a database that telegram the organization controls and has access to it" "It's like 'Russian oligarch starts unencrypted version of WhatsApp', a pixel for pixel clone of WhatsApp. That should be kind of a difficult brand to operate. And somehow, they've done a really amazing job of convincing the whole world that this is an encrypted messaging app and that the founder is some kind of Russian dissident, even though he goes there once a month, the whole team lives there, and their families are there." " What happened in France is they just chose not to respond to the subpoena. And so that's in violation of the law. And, he gets arrested in France, right? And everyone's like, oh, France, but I think the key point is they have the data, like they can respond to the subpoenas where as Signal, for instance, doesn't have access to the data and couldn't respond to that same request.  To me it's very obvious that Russia would've had a much less polite version of that conversation with Pavel Durov and the telegram team before this moment. "

1/ America's democratic backsliding under Trump has been far faster and steeper than in Russia under Putin, Hungary under Orban, Venezuela under Chavez, and Turkey under Erdogan, according to this remarkable graph and report from @jburnmurdoch in the Financial Times today.

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