Pavel Durov, the CEO of private messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France this weekend and charged under various spectacular crimes—terrorism, pedophilia, fraud, etc.—on the rationale that the company's failure to police and moderate users amounts to complicity in crimes involving use of the platform.
Durov was travelling aboard his private jet, TF1 said on its website, adding he had been targeted by an arrest warrant in France as part of a preliminary police investigation.
TF1 and BFM both said the investigation was focused on a lack of moderators on Telegram, and that police considered that this situation allowed criminal activity to go on undeterred on the messaging app.
Transiting through France seems to have been an error on his part, given the existence of an arrest warrant there.
Reportage so far is not great: not much context about Telegram that would allow readers to evaluate its claim to be a common carrier (it is widely used by Western politicians and journalists, for example, as well as criminals) or why Durov is a more likely target than others in his position. A specific flaw with coverage is Telegram being described as "encrypted," when in fact it is not accessibly so in the end-to-end sense that political debates over encryption usually concern. Matthew Green:
Telegram clearly fails to meet this stronger definition for a simple reason: it does not end-to-end encrypt conversations by default. If you want to use end-to-end encryption in Telegram, you must manually activate an optional end-to-end encryption feature called "Secret Chats" for every single private conversation you want to have. The feature is explicitly not turned on for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people in them. … Overall this is quite different from the experience of starting a new encrypted chat in an industry-standard modern messaging application, which simply requires you to open a new chat window. While it might seem like I'm being picky, the difference in adoption between default end-to-end encryption and this experience is likely very significant. The practical impact is that the vast majority of one-on-one Telegram conversations — and literally every single group chat — are probably visible on Telegram's servers, which can see and record the content of all messages sent between users.
Previously:
• Telegram allows you to 'unsend' messages coming from either party, and has no time limit
• Telegram: ever since Russia's blocking demand, Apple has prevented us from updating our app
• Russia's fumbling, heavy-handed Telegram ban is a perfect parable about the modern internet's promise and peril
• The upside of big tech is Russia vs Telegram, but the downside is Cloudflare vs SESTA
