Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

If you literally have plaintext documents responsive to criminal inquiries in a jurisdiction you are subject to, we don't reach the "internet censorship wars". You're in a place not dissimilar to a 1970s telephone company; the "random people can't simply declare themselves above the law wars". Don't be in that place. Encrypt end-to-end.

It looks like the author failed to grab that Durov asked for the French nationality and therefore is a French citizen who must comply to French law.

> Telegram is not the only company in the world which has a social media platform used for unlawful purposes

Except Telegram is the only one of those companies which intentionally doesn’t answers to legal requests. All other social networks are cooperating with law enforcers in the countries they operate.

Even Signal is cooperating when asked too. The difference is that unlike Signal, Telegram owns its users data in plaintext.

Also the author fails to understand that the complicity here doesn’t mean that companies in Europe are responsible for their users content. Like in the US, they are responsible if they fail to comply to laws in a reasonable time. Telegram doesn’t comply in a reasonable time since they voluntarily don’t comply at all. That’s a huge difference.

What makes Telegram unique is:

1) They have access to almost all the content

2) They try to use arguments about jurisdiction to avoid helping law enforcement with lawful requests

All the other messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage) have started to use end-to-end encryption to avoid being in this position in the first place. But they also comply with law enforcement and share the data they do have, and don't hinder lawful investigations.

The biggest issue with Telegram is that due to the lack of end-to-end encryption it is a huge security risk; how do you know the operators aren't selling access to your chats to some criminal actor or a repressive government agency? You don't.

Put differently, if you wanted to put together a charge list for the head of a large social media company you didn't like, this is what it would look like. If you wanted to put together a charge list for someone actively running the group chat of a terrorist group... this is what it would look like. And same for pretty much every level in between.

Deciding which of these scenarios is more likely is more indicative of your priors of the scenarios than it is of the evidence. Is this the French government going after a fairly innocuous service because they don't like what they provide? Or is it the government going after a service saying "neener neener your laws can't touch us"? Or is it the government going after an individual with tenuous connections to criminal organizations? Or one with solid connections to criminal organizations? Truthfully, we don't have the evidence to distinguish between these scenarios yet, and we should reserve judgement until such evidence comes to light.

(Also, maybe it’s nitpicking, but there are very obvious reasons why it’s better to have the Taliban using WhatsApp and the US getting all that metadata and maybe more, rather than the Taliban finding some other channel. If Washington wanted WhatsApp banned in Afghanistan it would’ve happened long ago.)

What I can’t figure out is, are these commentators naïve or just piling on for attention or what?

If you make a mockery of the law enforcement's requests made within the scope of the local laws then yes, you should get out. Especially if you show your middle finger to the country you visit and hold citizenship of.

Durov has money to buy citizenships that allow him access to most of the world without needing to obtain a visa so I'm sure he has a well-paid legal team that proactively monitor the situation. He may have been informed of the legal noose tightening around his neck and chose to go to France for one reason--France does not extradite its citizens and he happens to hold French citizenship. This puts him out of the reach of other jurisdictions (e.g. the US) and he may be hoping for a deal and better food. We should wait for official information from the French authorities as well as for news of people connected to him and his businesses falling out of windows. The former will explain the latter.

This completely ignores that the amount of criminal activity on Telegram in Europe as well as parts of Asia in itself has been escalating. The author is coming at this from a US-based point of view, which is fine, but unless you're particularly interested in the topic it's difficult for Americans to be aware of the scale of Telegram's role in criminality elsewhere, as this does not seem to be the case in the US. Maybe someone here knows why Telegram is not as core to organized crime in the US, and what communication methods are used there. But it's clear that in Europe and parts of Asia, its role is massive, and has been growing and growing without a limit in sight. This is easy to underestimate.

In these parts of the world, the scale of it is of a completely different magnitude than criminal activity on e.g. Facebook, which the author brings up but is a misguided comparison. And that's ignoring the relative percentages of legit vs criminal activity, which are inverted (if not worse) between the two platforms, because that's not as important.

Scale and absolute numbers, the absolute detrimental effect on society, matter.

I don't see this as an escalation because there was always going to be a line somewhere. A line where the amount of criminal activity on a platform, which when crossed , was going to cause arrests. Telegram's continuous growth in this aspect means that the line has now been crossed.

And in reality, this line exists anywhere even in the US. It might be higher, but it's still there. The idea of not having such a line is clearly insane - that would mean no matter if something completely destroys society, we're going to let it pass. Such lines are almost never enshrined in law, for obvious reasons. They only become visible to everyone as they are crossed.

Telegram is FSB project, lost all my doubts about.

Furthermore, after his failure with his crypto project in the United States, he returned to his homeland, and the Kremlin immediately "unblocked" Telegram. The next day, Durov promised investors to pay off the debts. Quite a coincidence.

Telegram also has taken down various channels from one side of the global conflict and not others. For example, he took down the channel of Iranians protesting against the dictatorship in 2017, but he refuses to take down the channels that sell child *pornography, drug$, human trafficking, or Ru$$ians posting videos of beheading Ukrainian POWs, etc.

This whole situation is really complicated, to say the least. Freedom of speech is paramount, but in times of global information warfare, it's not really possible to stay neutral as the owner of the top communication platform. Especially given the horrific stuff that’s being done on this platform.

He says he is neutral, but the facts indicate that it's not quite true. And it’s understandable from the aspect that his life is probably at risk if he doesn’t cooperate. So, it seems he's just trying to navigate a delicate balance, maneuvering between conflicting pressures. Prison is not great, even if it’s French, but Europe is less likely to give him novichok tea, so he apparently chose to work with the other side.

I'm not saying the French aren't serious about the charges they've published but they're hardly the main point.

There's plenty in the media about the use of Telegram by the the Russian military and intelligence services, as well as politicians. For example: https://www.politico.eu/article/telegram-ceo-arrest-pavel-du...

"Importation d'un moyen de cryptologie n'assurant pas exclusivement des fonctions d'authentification ou de contrôle d'intégrité sans déclaration préalable."

- Import of a cryptographic mean that does not exclusively perform authentication or integrity control functions without prior declaration.

This to me is a deeply disturbing charge, would that mean that using full disk encryption I'd be liable to be charged with that? Did the maintainers of LUKS do a prior declaration? If not are they likely to be charged if they ever travel to France?

After all, I can fully imagine a server being seized in a data center being encrypted with LUKS. In that case, is it the fault of the maintainers?

The public non-encrypted aliases or bio of users often contain wordings that explicitly spell out they sell drugs or sex.

For instance, one alias is "WEED COKE MDMA SPE..."

I don't have a clear opinion on whether drugs or selling sex should be illegal or not, can see pros/cons, but my opinion is irrelevant, my point here is that Law Enforcement, might find this very problematic, that there is obviously no moderation here.

The point is to emotionally manipulate the audience into complicity. To cause people not to question the underlying privacy and legal issues.

Instead they want the reader to have thoughts of large numbers of people, in organized networks presumably, that want to cause terror to them or harm to their children.

This causes a reaction in many people to forget about basic rights and focus on the fear they have been given instead.

I'm sure France and the U.S. have a million reasons to want this data from the Ukraine war, to probably some cases of the things they claim. However, it is definitely exaggerated and no one should be willing to trade the ability to communicate privately out of some fear that people who want to harm you are also able to communicate privately.

None of it really makes any logical sense because at the end of the day, to end all encryption means the Government would have to basically criminalize math.

So of course they rely on the reliable methods of emotional manipulation. I mean, they should have a blank check to go after this guy and anyone else, right? You don't support terrorism do you???

> In a subsequent statement, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said Durov was arrested as part of a probe into an unnamed person launched by the office's cybercrime unit on July 8.

So the probe was launched in July, but the warrant was issued in March? I do not understand that. Was warrant issued on a different case? Is information about warrant incorrect?

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/france/20240826-telegram-ceo-pav...

[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/exclusive-telegram-ceo-broth...

But specifically, the issue with the likes of today's Facebook and Twitter (no idea about Telegram) is that they do NOT «just passively host the content», in fact they started to actively engage into its editorializing as soon as they switched to using «algorithmic feeds» !

This has even been a pretty big legislative battle in EU a few years ago, when there were attempts to try to legislate «3rd way(s)» between the extremes of dumb hosting and online newspaper :

https://communia-association.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/...

(Anyone has an up to date chart with the current situation, ideally in English ?)

https://communia-association.org/2024/06/10/article-17-five-...

Is there a difference between telegram and other social media messenger hybrids?

Do they allow anti Russian content the same way they allow pro Russian content?

Is that a problem?

Here, the French government is accusing Durov of being complicit with – i.e. aiding and abetting – criminal activity and also unlicensed provision of “cryptological” software, with encryption products subject to prior government authorization before their use in France will be approved.

- at Apple's demand Telegram made adult-themed groups unaccessible by default

- at Apple's or Google's demand Telegram removed an animated emoji of an exploding eggplant

Though those requests resemble censorship rather than preventing crime.

Yes, France is more and more corrupt, the fact that they deny anticor the right to pursue lawsuit against companies and politicians since 2023 is proof, but this arrest in particular seems well within the legal system (if he is kept under surveillance for more than 96 hours however I will agree with the author, but frankly it's a 'broken clock right twice a day' kind of agreement)

Durov is being persecuted for his role as a CEO of Telegram. Telegram is a legal entity that has nothing to do with France