By 1917, British Intelligence could decipher most German messages. Room 40 also received a copy of the German diplomatic code, stolen from a German diplomat’s luggage in the Near East. In October of 1914, the Russian admiralty gave British Naval Intelligence (known as Room 40) a copy of the German naval codebook removed from a drowned German sailor’s body from the cruiser SMS Magdeburg. Britain began capturing large volumes of intelligence communications.īritish code breakers worked to decrypt communication codes. Soon after the war began, the British successfully tapped into overseas cable lines Germany borrowed from neutral countries to send communications. It is also possible to independently verify that Telegram apps available on Google Play and App Store are built.

This code allows security researchers to fully evaluate our end-to-end encryption implementation. In 1914, with war imminent, the British had quickly dispatched a ship to cut Germany’s five trans-Atlantic cables and six underwater cables running between Britain and Germany. We have published the code for our Android, iOS, web and desktop apps (Win, macOS and Linux) as well as the Telegram Database Library. The secret to the British interception began years earlier.

Months earlier, British intelligence had intercepted a secret message from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the Mexican government, inviting an alliance (along with Japan) that would recover the southwestern states Mexico lost to the U.S. On March 1, 1917, the American public learned about a German proposal to ally with Mexico if the United States entered the war.