French prosecutors say Telegram CEO freed from custody, will appear in court

He's not yet freed from custody AFAIK, but my interpretation of the word "custody" in English may be lacking.

The initial police examination/interrogation has ended ("garde à vue"), and he's now been brought before a judge who will decide if he should be freed or kept in an actual jail (which a police station isn't).

Until the judge makes that decision he's still very much detained by the police (albeit not interrogated).

Folks, he is free from the initial custody, but was brought to court today, which will decide on further steps.

The AP article is rambling and disappointing, literally the DailyMail has a more coherent coverage:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13788495/telegram-f...

People are up in arms about this and the "stifling of free speech," but it seems like there is only one sentence in this article that really matters:

> "Telegram refused to share information or documents with investigators when required by law."

Am I the only one who thinks that if you are a global company operating in a country and you refuse to comply with a lawful subpoena in that country, no one should be surprised when you get arrested? If they cannot comply, due to encryption, or a lack of logging, that may be a different story. But no one has stated or implied that anywhere I have seen.

People make these equivalences to other social media platforms, but alas it is the only social media I use where I frequently see stuff like IS recruitment videos in larger groups. That is, professionally produced videos in my local language. It's always the same videos as well, so you'd think they at least ban known bad files by hash or something, but nope, they get removed manually by the group's mods hours later.

Some credit reports that Durov travelled to Russia more than 60 times between 2014 and 2021. https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk/status/1828498176854385111

Honest question for this group: Does anyone actually believe Telegram has any sort of privacy? Like, I assume all your TG data is available to the Kremlin in the same way that all your TikTok data is available to the CCP.

Politico claims to have (exclusively) seen a French administrative document that narrows the focus to a single case where Telegram did not respond to legal request for user information. Copied from the article, here are a few key points:

> The arrest warrants were issued after the messaging platform gave "no answer" to an earlier judicial request to identify a Telegram user, according to the document, which was shared with POLITICO by a person directly involved in the case.

> Warrants for Pavel and his brother Nikolai, the platform’s co-founder, were issued on March 25 over charges including “complicity in possessing, distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in an organized group.”

> The warrants were issued after an undercover investigation into Telegram led by the cybercrime branch of the Paris prosecutor's office, during which a suspect discussed luring underaged girls into sending "self-produced child pornography," and then threatening to release it on social media.

> The suspect also told the investigators he had raped a young child, according to the document. Telegram did not respond to the French authorities’ request to identify the suspect.

> There’s no suggestion either of the Durov brothers were directly involved in any of the illegal activities identified by the investigation.

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

This is extremely interesting.

At first people expected him to be jailed, because he obviously has means to leave France and never get caught again, but then analysts pointed out that he knew there was a warrant in France to get him and that he decided to land in France anyway, so they raised the question that maybe he came voluntarily in order to strike a deal with French authorities.

The fact that he's now free from custody sounds like this analysis was likely the right one.

The most ironic part of this news is that "Macron posted on X."

That's a flight risk if I ever heard of one.

some American media is reporting that his personal cell phone was hacked for a long time before this arrest. One implication is that he is personally "dirty" in some real way -- so the story essentially supports the arrest and charges.

Since this is high public profile by definition, expect lots more questionable spin to come.. IMHO

"French prosecutors say Telegram CEO freed from custody, will appear in court"

No, he won't.

We already know how this will end. Russia will arrest a few French tourists on trumped up charges and they'll sit in a sad Russian jail until Macron intervenes and lets Durov go. It's the same playbook over and over. Durov is like the Russian Mark Zuckerberg, people at this level are not touchable by the law if they have the czar's favor.

Now this thing goes in since a few days. Are I'm the only one who wonder, why France does not release a proper press release? Is this really a country in central Europe, they catch a super public figure and just .. say nothing?!?

Shame.

I wonder if we'll see him pull something like this [1]: An ex-CEO of Nissan fleeing Japan in a box!

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57760993

> In addition to Russia and France, Durov is also a citizen of the United Arab Emirates and the Caribbean island nation of St. Kitts and Nevis.

So four citizenships? It's getting hard not look at this as dodgy.

Have to assume they are about to arrest the CEO's of all of the largest internet providers in France for the same reasons. If not then this is absolutely a political decision and France has decided to punish anyone daring to allow people to speak without government supervision.