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TITLE: Neo-Nazis head to encrypted Simplex @simplex Chat app, bail on Telegram

App swears there's no way for law enforcement to track users' identities.

David Gilbert, wired.com
Oct 5, 2024 7:00 am
Credit: Stadratte

Dozens of neo-Nazis are fleeing Telegram and moving to a relatively unknown secret chat app that has received funding from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. (Simplex)

In a report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue published on Friday morning, researchers found that in the wake of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov and charges against leaders of the so-called Terrorgram Collective, dozens of extremist groups have moved to the app SimpleX Chat in recent weeks over fears that Telegram’s privacy policies expose them to being arrested. The Terrorgram Collective is a neo-Nazi propaganda network that calls for acolytes to target government officials, attack power stations, and murder people of color.

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While ISD stopped short of naming SimpleX in its report, the researchers point out that the app promotes itself as “having a different burner email or phone for each contact, and no hassle to manage them.” This is exactly how SimpleX refers to itself on its website.

Last month, one accelerationist group linked to the now defunct neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, with more than 13,000 subscribers on Telegram, began migrating to SimpleX. Administrators of the channel advised subscribers that “while it's not as smooth as Telegram, it appears to be miles ahead with regard to privacy and security.”

The group now has 1,000 members on SimpleX and, according to ISD, is “part of a wider network built by neo-Nazi accelerationists that consists of nearly 30 channels and group chats,” which includes other well-known accelerationist groups like the Base. Accelerationists seek to speed up the downfall of Western society by triggering a race war in order to rebuild civilization based on their own white Christian values.

The network of groups on SimpleX is also sharing extremist content, including al-Qaeda training manuals, Hamas rocket development guides, neo-Nazi accelerationist handbooks, and militant anarchist literature. And in their newly secure channels on SimpleX, the members of the groups have immediately made direct calls for violence.

“During a 24-hour period on September 25, analysts observed three instances of users calling for the assassination of Vice President Kamala Harris, and one instance calling for the assassination of former President Donald Trump,” the ISD researchers wrote. “Similarly, numerous users called for a race war that would hasten the fall of society, allow them to take the US by force, and institute their desired system of white supremacy.”

SimpleX Chat is an app that was founded by UK-based developer Evgeny Poberezkin. It was initially launched in 2021, and a blog post in August announced that it had passed 100,000 downloads on Google’s Play Store. The same blog post announced that Dorsey had led a $1.3 million investment round, having previously praised the app on other social media platforms. Dorsey did not reply to a request for comment.

Poberezkin told WIRED that he was unaware of the migration of neo-Nazi groups to his platform, but says he believes that despite his network’s focus on privacy, SimpleX can curb the spread of terrorist or abusive material on its app.

“Even in these early days we already did more to prevent distribution of [child sexual abuse material] via the preset servers included in the app than many other platforms did, even though they have much more control,” Poberezkin says. “While we cannot indiscriminately scan all content, and it would have been a human rights violation to do so, if the group entry point is publicly promoted and can be joined, and it uses the servers that we operate, we can remove these entry points and the files from the servers. A very important quality of the SimpleX network is that users cannot be approached unless they want to be. It protects the users from any hostile actors and unwanted promotions.”

In February of this year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that forcing encrypted messaging apps to provide a backdoor to law enforcement was illegal, a decision that undermined the EU’s plan to force encrypted messaging apps to scan all user content for identifiers of child sexual abuse material.

For years, neo-Nazi groups have flourished on Telegram, many of them under the assumption that Telegram was a fully encrypted platform that provided a greater level of security than it really did. Telegram was used by these groups for building out their networks, sharing propaganda, and planning attacks. However, two of the leaders of the Terrorgram Collective were arrested and charged last month, which was a key factor in triggering the migration to SimpleX, the ISD analysts wrote. The group used Telegram to encourage acts of terrorism in the US and overseas.

“For terrorists and violent extremists looking to avoid detection, SimpleX Chat provides significant advantages over Telegram, largely due to its design and features that prioritize privacy and anonymity,” Marc-André Argentino, a senior research fellow at the Accelerationism Research Consortium, wrote last month in an analysis also discussing the migration of extremists from Telegram to the new platform. “SimpleX offers end-to-end encryption by default for all messages, whereas Telegram only encrypts conversations in its ‘secret chats.’”

Poberezkin says that SimpleX is “100 percent private by design” and that even if he wanted to, he couldn’t access information about user IP addresses. Another key privacy aspect of the app is that, unlike most other encrypted chat apps, SimpleX does not require users to enter a phone number or email to register for an account—removing one of the key ways that law enforcement can track down users on other platforms.

“SimpleX, at its core, is designed to be truly distributed with no central server. This allows for enormous scalability at low cost, and also makes it virtually impossible to snoop on the network graph,” Poberezkin wrote in a company blog post published in 2022.

SimpleX’s policies expressly prohibit “sending illegal communications” and outline how SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.

Argentino wrote in his analysis that discussion about moving from Telegram to platforms with better security measures began in June, with discussion of SimpleX as an option taking place in July among a number of extremist groups. Though it wasn’t until September, and the Terrorgram arrests, that the decision was made to migrate to SimpleX, the groups are already establishing themselves on the new platform.

“The groups that have migrated are already populating the platform with legacy material such as Terrorgram manuals and are actively recruiting propagandists, hackers, and graphic designers, among other desired personnel,” the ISD researchers wrote.

However, there are some downsides to the additional security provided by SimpleX, such as the fact that it is not as easy for these groups to network and therefore grow, and disseminating propaganda faces similar restrictions.

“While there is newfound enthusiasm over the migration, it remains unclear if the platform will become a central organizing hub,” ISD researchers wrote.

And Poberezkin believes that the current limitations of his technology will mean these groups will eventually abandon SimpleX.

“SimpleX is a communication network rather than a service or a platform where users can host their own servers, like in OpenWeb, so we were not aware that extremists have been using it,” says Poberezkin. “We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance. We do not think it is technically possible to create a social network of a meaningful size in the SimpleX network.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.