MOSCOW. Dec 12 (Interfax) - Two out of six numbers whose encryption keys were sought by the Federal Security Service (FSB) from Telegram company belong to two defendants in the St. Petersburg metro attack case, a lawyer of the messenger, Dmitry Dinze, said at the Meshchansky District Court in Moscow on Tuesday.
"The last two phone numbers are related to the inquiry into a terrorist case, which is being conducted by the Russian Investigative Committee. These numbers belong to Arbor and Akram Azimov," Dinze said, adding that he was also representing one of those persons.
The lawyer said that the Azimov brothers were not using those numbers. "They were not using Telegram, their correspondence was conducted in WhatsApp," he said.
The phones have not been used by the owners since April 2017 due to their seizure in the course of the criminal inquiry, the lawyer said. The FSB "tried to mislead the court by requesting phone information accumulated since July of this year," he said.
"That was meaningless because those numbers were inactive," Dinze said.
It would have been technically impossible to provide the keys to the Federal Security Service even if Telegram had wanted to, he said.
"There are two chats on the Telegram, confidential and cloud. Chat encryption keys change after every 100 messages or about once a week, and no one, including the software developer, can decipher messages sent in the confidential chat; this can be done only by the sender, who may do so using a special application. Even there the keys are constantly changed," the lawyer said.
This is the reason why Telegram cannot provide encryption keys for the messages sent earlier, much like with future keys, Dinze said. Besides, the messenger is technically unable to storing so many messages and their encryption keys on its servers, he said.
According to the lawyers, Telegram did not respond to the FSB request because it deemed it to be illegal.
"There is a strictly regulated procedure for sending an inquiry to a foreign company seated abroad. This can be done either via the Foreign Ministry, or via the prosecution service, or via a direct contact between law enforcement agencies. Yet they send the request to our mail: 'Hello, this is want we want'. Telegram had reasons to doubt the legitimacy of this request," another lawyer, Ramil Akhmetgaliyev, said.
The FSB asked the Telegram London office on July 12 to provide information about six phone numbers before July 16. Telegram did not respond to the message.
The FSB informed the messenger's executives on August 31 it would bring administrative charges of the failure of comply with the federal law on the storage, execution, and transmission of information. That was done on September 14.