The way America is conducting the war on terror is both self-defeating and morally repugnant.

We basically have one shot, per body in the solar system, to find an example of life with an independent abiogenesis point. Right now biology only gets to work with a single example; the impact that finding another would have on the field really cannot be understated^W overstated.

Now, you may not be particularly interested in biology, preferring space travel, but you should be. Any realistic attempt to terraform Mars will require a lot of skill with genetic engineering. Furthermore, the discovery of life that can only be properly studied on Mars would provide a major boost to any colonization effort. The more 'kinds of science we use to justify the initial expenditure, the better.

He's done nothing in crypto, and he's rolled his own protocol. That's historically been recipe for disaster regardless of how many honors you hold.

Colin Percival is similarly decorated, along with being a cryptographer (he's the FreeBSD security officer): http://www.daemonology.net/papers/

... yet even his crypto app Tarsnap was broken for over a year before he noticed, due to a typo during an innocent-looking refactoring change. http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-...

And the only reason the critical bug was found is because it was open source. This, as far as I can see, isn't.

So we have a perfect storm of problems here: An author who has rolled his own crypto, isn't a cryptographer, and whose product is closed source. Trust Telegram at your peril.

It's worth noting that there's an app which already does what Telegram claims to do. It's called TextSecure, and it was written by Moxie Marlinspoke and several other big-name cryptographers: https://whispersystems.org/

... and it's open source: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/

... and they don't try to roll their own crypto: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/wiki/ProtocolV2

These aren't coincidences. It's basic necessity.

EDIT: Telegram is open source, so I was wrong about that and it'd be unfair of me not to mention it. But the other observations still apply. Until Telegram is verified to be secure, I don't think it's a good idea to trust it, especially when secure alternatives like TextSecure exist.