Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, Arrested in France

Reuters:

Pavel Durov, the Russian-born billionaire founder and owner of the Telegram messaging app, was arrested at Le Bourget airport outside Paris shortly after landing on a private jet late on Saturday and placed in custody, three sources told Reuters.

The arrest of the 39-year-old technology billionaire prompted on Sunday a warning from Moscow to Paris that he should be accorded his rights and criticism from X owner Elon Musk who said that free speech in Europe was under attack.

Such a warning is particularly rich coming from Russia so soon after the negotiated release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.

Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of cooperation with police, a third French police source said.

I don’t yet have enough information to form an opinion on this arrest, but I will emphasize one point. There’s a reaction going around that this is ridiculous because Telegram is “encrypted” and thus can’t be moderated so arresting Durov for failing to moderate Telegram is a backdoor way of arresting him for providing encrypted communication. This is the result of a yearslong propaganda campaign by Telegram to describe itself using adjectives like “encrypted” and “secure”. It’s not. But the propaganda campaign has been extraordinarily successful.

Here’s Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike back in February 2022, who, say what you will about Signal and the Signal Foundation, knows his shit about actual end-to-end encryption:

Telegram is the most popular messenger in urban Ukraine. After a decade of misleading marketing and press, most ppl there believe it’s an “encrypted app”

The reality is the opposite-TG is by default a cloud database w/ a plaintext copy of every msg everyone has ever sent/recvd.

One-on-one chats in Telegram are not encrypted by default and group chats never are. Telegram employees have access to every single message ever sent to every group.

So, given how widely used Telegram is — perhaps especially in Ukraine — you can see why Russia is upset that Durov was arrested.

★ Sunday, 25 August 2024