The Guardian: “Since the leaked footage had gone public, Osechkin said, other whistleblowers had begun leaking videos from inside at least four other Russian prisons. “I’m proud of that, that I’ve set an example for others with access to information,” said Savelyev, who laughed off popular comparisons to the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

In Saratov, he notes, more than 400 inmates have now complained about torture, extortion and sexual abuse at the hands of prison authorities. “It’s a very big number,” he says. “Nothing like that has been seen before.”

There is little chance that he can return to Russia or his native Belarus in the foreseeable future. But for now, he says, he feels safe.

“I want to continue this,” he says. “For the first time in many years, what I’m doing brings me satisfaction. And it helps people.

The recordings of abuse, which Savelyev said were premeditated and then handed off to prison officials or deleted, showed that “these instances of torture, including rape, were committed by order and weren’t just individual decisions”, said Osechkin. Osechkin has written a public letter to Vladimir Putin calling for an end to the “pipeline of torture”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/08/i-was-always-scared-inmate-who-exposed-systemic-russian-prisoner-abuse

US State Dept. Approves $9.4 Billion in Deals to Sell Greece Littoral Combat Ships, Upgrade Frigates

Two potential weapons deals with US ally Greece were given the go-ahead by the US State Department on Friday, which would see four older frigates get extensive upgrades and also supply them with four new warships.

In one deal, the US would sell Athens four Multi-Mission Surface Combatant (MMSC) ships, better known as Freedom-class littoral combat ships, along with a range of associated equipment and weaponry, including radars, sonar arrays, combat management systems, rockets, and missiles, together totalling $6.9 billion.

In the other, the US would agree to supply equipment and expertise for repairing, updating and enhancing the Hellenic Navy’s four Hydra-class frigates, which are also known by the German-built family of warships of which they are a part: MEKO. The deal is worth $2.5 billion.

Pavel Durov, the creator of the social network Telegram, made a high-profile statement denouncing the unfettered "extraction of private information" from messengers like WhatsApp

The creator of Telegram said that according to a recent report, Telegram sticks to its promise to keep its users' data private, while claiming that apps like WhatsApp transmit their users' personal data in real-time to third parties and, despite its many claims of "E2E encryption," may also disclose the content of messages.

The report mentioned by Durov confirmed that Telegram remains one of the few messaging apps that does not violate its users' trust.

The entrepreneur also expressed indignation over the fact that other apps do not have free will in terms of guaranteeing the privacy of their users' personal data. In his opinion, engineers, working on the messengers "they have to secretly implement backdoors in their apps when the US government orders them to", and the public disclosure of this fact could lead to the arrest of the employee, who decided to take such a step due to breaching a gag order.

Anticipating the possibility of parrying his statement with the fact that a court order is required to access personal data, Durov noted, "agencies don't even need a court order to extract private information from messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and in other cases, court documents are shrouded in secrecy. Some supposedly secure apps have been funded by government agencies from their inception (e.g Anom, Signal)."

Another argument against the "security" of most social networks appealed to the National Security Agency (NSA), which according to Durov "has been making sure that international encryption standards are in line with what the NSA can decipher, and all other approaches to encryption are labeled as "non-standard" or "home-brew". Through their proxies in the encryption industry (like this one), the NSA imposed flawed standards onto the encryption used by the rest of the world, cautioning everyone else from "rolling out their own encryption".

WhatsApp and other U.S. apps "are plagued with backdoors – intentionally planted security loopholes that governments (and anybody else) can use to hack smartphones and extract private data from people." the billionaire added.

In his statement, Pavel mentioned the problems of his U.S. competitors. In his opinion, there is no way they can compete with Telegram in terms of growth rates, despite investing heavily in marketing (something Telegram has never had to invest in).