Why the Arrest of Telegram’s CEO Should Worry Everyone. Yes, Including You.
Reading Time: 7 minutesPavel Durov was arrested by French authorities on Saturday—kicking off a firestorm of concerns about government overreach, privacy, and free speech., Telegram CEO’s arrest: Why France’s arrest of Pavel Durov should worry you.
If you’re connected to the tech world or even slightly interested in it, you probably noticed and were maybe even alarmed by a major event this past weekend: the sudden arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov by French authorities at Le Bourget Airport, outside Paris, late Saturday night. This action was reportedly taken as part of the French government’s investigation into illegal activity coordinated across Durov’s app, a secretive messaging platform often employed by networks of criminals and scammers (though by no means exclusively so). It took until Monday for the French government to provide an official release on the charges it was investigating—including ‘complicity’ in the distribution of drugs and child sexual abuse material—with regard to a different suspected criminal. After holding him for 96 hours, French law enforcement transferred Durov from police custody to a Parisian court, where he awaits further questioning and a possible indictment as of Wednesday afternoon. [Update, Aug. 28, 2024, at 4:22 p.m.: Le Monde reported Wednesday that a French judge has indicted Durov on all 12 charges laid out by the French Court of Justice. Per a judicial press release, Durov is to be ‘placed under judicial supervision, with the obligation to pay bail of 5 million euros; to report to the police station twice a week; and to be banned from leaving French territory.’]
There were few other details offered about Durov’s prosecution in the immediate aftermath, and there remain plenty of questions, as well as legitimate concerns, about why all this is happening in the first place. So, naturally, the initial reactions sent out even bigger digital shock waves than the arrest itself had. Right-wingers like Tucker Carlson (who interviewed Durov on his post–Fox News online show back in April and calls him a ‘friend‘) declared that his arrest was an indicator of democratic backsliding among NATO-member nations like France and the United States. This sentiment was echoed by venture capitalist and podcaster David Sacks, who implied that an international deep-state apparatus had worked to crack down on this free-speech platform. (An odd theory, considering that French President Emmanuel Macron himself uses Telegram and had held a private lunch with Durov in 2018.) Elon Musk acolytes such as Ian Miles Cheong and Naomi Seibt catapulted off Sacks’ claim to warn that this was all a pretext for these governments to go after X, another supposed ‘free-speech bastion.’
Other reactions were more uncertain, due to the vague nature of the case. The New York Times’ Zeynep Tufekci urged caution before calling Durov’s arrest a ‘free speech infringement,’ as did Stanford Cyber Policy Center expert Daphne Keller. Techdirt’s Mike Masnick noted that the French press release had not ‘calmed the concerns that this is overreach, but nothing has made it clear that it definitely is overreach either.’ A legal counselor for the digital-rights watchdog Access Now tweeted that even though Telegram has historically been terrible about protecting its users and abiding by regulations, the French government’s actions could still set a troubling precedent for government overreach.
Because Telegram is popular primarily in other countries, Americans may know little about Pavel Durov, his signature app, and why any of this matters—and it does matter, even if you’re completely in the dark on the exact reasons. Allow me to break it all down below.
So, who is Pavel Durov?
Durov is a Russian tech entrepreneur who rose to success in the mid-2000s, when he was inspired by the emergence of Facebook to create a similar social network for Russian users. With the help of two university classmates and his older brother Nikolai, Durov launched the website VKontakte, better known as VK, to the public in 2007. It quickly became Russia’s most popular social network, a status it maintains today.
However, Durov clashed with the Russian government on multiple occasions: in 2011, after officials demanded that VK scrub accounts belonging to opposition politicians contesting that year’s elections; and in 2014, when Russia requested personal data belonging to various Ukrainian protesters and also asked that Durov obscure famed dissident Alexei Navalny’s page from broader access. After these conflicts, Durov was fired from VK, inspiring him to flee Russia and begin working on a different venture.
I assume that venture was Telegram?
Correct! The year before he left VK (and Russia), Durov worked again with Nikolai to develop and launch Telegram, meant to be a ‘secure and fun‘ platform that offered various means by which users could protect from undue surveillance the messages they sent one another: encryption options, lack of ability to forward messages from one established chat room to a different one, increased bandwidth for quickly transmitting large files and attachments, and an option to set ‘self-destruct’ timers on particular messages.
Such features (particularly the forwarding and storage terms, as well as the wide number of participants who could join one relatively unregulated chatroom) differentiated Telegram from other secure texting apps, like Signal and WhatsApp—it also became something of a social network. Telegram rode its creator’s fame to garner hundreds of thousands of users within months of its launch, earning quick uptake in regions including the Middle East and East Asia, where communicators looked to duck government overreach and censorship. In subsequent years, Telegram’s base grew to encompass hundreds of millions of users, many of them based in South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and even Durov’s home country of Russia.
Seems like a cool app. What’s the issue?
There have been many. One of them deals with the nature of Telegram’s supposed encryption. Unlike WhatsApp and Signal, end-to-end encryption is not the default option for messages on the platform, and it’s difficult for lay users to manually encrypt each conversation they’d wish to protect, as Johns Hopkins University professor and cryptographer Matthew Green has written. This is before you even get into the custom chat rooms and one-way broadcast channels with large numbers of participants—Telegram’s most popular, and least secured, feature. With its lack of default encryption for the vast majority of messages, plus its habit of storing messages in plain text on its servers, Telegram’s contents were clearly not as safeguarded as its marketing would have you believe.
Oh, yeah, and it maybe wasn’t a great free-speech platform either, given that it granted a 2017 request from the Iranian government to shut down a grassroots protest channel that had called for violent action. Though in fairness, the app has stood firm against other censorship orders from autocracies like Myanmar and Russia, the latter of which temporarily banned the app in 2018.
Other issues were reputational. If you’d heard of Telegram at any point over the past few years, it was probably because you’d stumbled across a story of the app being used for crimes: cryptocurrency scams, distribution of unlawfully hacked or stolen data, sales of illegal products like drugs and weapons, and the nonconsensual spread of sexts and pornographic images—including child sexual abuse.
Durov’s principled stance against government-driven privacy violations often ran up against the app’s lack of 1) user protection, 2) anti-crime provisions, and 3) internal moderation, which allowed many hateful actors to transmit horrific rhetoric and video. Its anti-government stance also meant that it refused to even voluntarily report to regulatory authorities instances of distribution of child-sexual-abuse material, which made international law enforcement’s job all the more difficult.
So what landed Durov in trouble this time?
The details remain sketchy, but here’s what we know for sure. On Saturday, Durov flew from Azerbaijan to France on his private jet—along with his bodyguard and a crypto influencer named Juli Vavilova—and was arrested after disembarking at Le Bourget, where the French child-sexual-abuse investigation agency OFMIN served him a warrant. Per the release from the French Court of Justice, the ongoing investigation, which kicked off July 8, was not meant to specifically target Durov; there is allegedly a different, still-unidentified individual in the crosshairs.
According to a Wednesday-morning Politico report, France sent out arrest warrants for Durov and Nikolai back in March, ‘after the messaging platform gave ‘no answer’ to an earlier judicial request to identify a Telegram user.’ This user, according to the French undercover investigation that spurred the warrants, evidently ‘discussed luring underaged girls into sending ‘self-produced child pornography,’ ‘ threatened ‘to release it on social media,’ and ‘told the investigators he had raped a young child.’ Following Telegram’s refusal to name the suspect, French law enforcement called the platform out with regard to the other criminal activities that occur there, as well as the Durovs’ consistent avoidance of government authority.
In addition, Durov is the subject of a criminal complaint in Switzerland, per Forbes, which was filed by a former partner of his who claimed he regularly abused one of the children they’d had together. That case has no bearing on France’s, but it signals further legal trouble for Durov.
So Durov is definitely being held liable for … something. There is only one direct charge in the French court’s release (money laundering), and the rest are far more abstract. There are six complaints for which the accused is held to be ‘complicit’: possessing and spreading child porn, managing an online platform for illegal transactions, committing ‘organized fraud,’ providing access to hacking tools ‘without legitimate reason,’ and selling drugs. One further charge consists of ‘refusal to communicate’ helpful material to appropriate crime-busting authorities, and yet another involves a vague ‘criminal association with a view to committing a crime or an offense punishable by 5 or more years of imprisonment.’
The most worrying charges for free-speech advocates come at the end. There are two counts around the provision of ‘cryptology services’—in this case, privatized messaging encoded to be invisible to third parties—that don’t require users to register their real identities or prove that they’re not criminals. There’s one more count of ‘importing’ such a service ‘without prior declaration’—which would imply that France sees the use of internationally based, unregulated ‘encryption’ service as a crime all its own.
If Telegram is being targeted for simply existing as the secretive platform it purports to be, that could certainly spell trouble for digital privacy globally. Whether or not you like Telegram, the fact is that messaging services with options for end-to-end encryption are an essential, popular, and easily accessible means by which users can avoid undue surveillance from repressive governmental authorities, overly intrusive cops, and bad-faith actors who’d like to disrupt righteous protests and rallies. If France decides that encryption itself is bad because criminals may use it, its fellow European Union members may wish to follow suit—and privacy all over the world will suffer.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG