Telegram founder's arrest is radical — if it's a crime to build privacy tools, there will be no privacy
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Pavel Durov's arrest suggests that the law enforcement dragnet is being widened from private financial transactions to private speech.

Pavel Durov’s arrest suggests that the law enforcement dragnet is being widened from private financial transactions to private speech.

The arrest of the Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France this week is extremely significant. It confirms that we are deep into the second crypto war, where governments are systematically seeking to prosecute developers of digital encryption tools because encryption frustrates state surveillance and control. While the first crypto war in the 1990s was led by the United States, this one is led jointly by the European Union — now its own regulatory superpower.

Durov, a former Russian, now French citizen, was arrested in Paris on Saturday, and has now been indicted. You can read the French accusations here. They include complicity in drug possession and sale, fraud, child pornography and money laundering. These are extremely serious crimes — but note that the charge is complicity, not participation. The meaning of that word “complicity” seems to be revealed by the last three charges: Telegram has been providing users a “cryptology tool” unauthorised by French regulators.

  • mox
    19•3 months ago

    It would be easy to dismiss the headline’s claim because Telegram’s design makes it arguably not a privacy tool in the first place.

    However, it is possible that this arrest was chosen in part for that reason, with the knowledge that privacy and cryptography advocates wouldn’t be so upset by the targeting of a tool that is already weak in those areas. This could be an early step in a plan to gradually normalize outlawing cryptographic tools, piece by piece. (Legislators and spy agencies have demonstrated that they want to do this, after all.) With such an approach, the people affected might not resist much until it’s too late, like boiling the proverbial frog.

    Watching from the sidelines, it’s impossible to see the underlying motivations or where this is going. I just hope this doesn’t become case law for eventual use in criminalizing solid cryptography.

    • Neon 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇪🇺🏳️‍⚧️🇹🇼🇮🇱🏳️‍🌈
      -6•3 months ago

      You’re thinking too far. As someone who knows two people that worked for the Swiss government closely:

      Don’t worry about it. The whole deepstate Idea is absolutely ridiculous.

      There is no big plan to weaken encryption or anything. There was probably a single prosecutor working on a case involving Telegram that saw his chance and took it.

      Seriously, you should be a lot more worried about google or meta, not western democracies.

      Unless you live in russia/china/iran/yourFavouriteDictatorship, then forget whatever I just said. But if you live there, what’s happening in France isn’t a Problem to you anymore since your government does it anyways lol

      But yeah, I’m getting a not tired of the deepstate conspiracies. He broke the law, that’s why he gets arrested, not because of some deepstate conspiracy

      • mox
        13•3 months ago

        What are you on about?

        When legislation aiming to restrict people’s rights fails to pass, it is very common for legislators/governments to try again shortly thereafter, and then again, and again, until some version of it eventually does pass. With each revision, some wording might be replaced, or weak assurances added, or the most obvious targets changed to placate the loudest critics. It might be broken up in to several parts, to be proposed separately over time. But the overall goal remains the same. This practice is (part of) why vigilance and voting are so important in democracies.

        There’s nothing “deep state” about it. It’s plainly visible, on the record, and easily verifiable.

        As someone who knows two people that worked for the Swiss government closely

        This is an appeal to authority (please look it up) and a laughably weak one at that.

        There is no big plan to weaken encryption or anything.

        You obviously have not been keeping up with events surrounding this topic over the past 30 years.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•3 months ago

        There is no big plan to weaken encryption or anything.

        This may not be a symptom of such a plan, but there very much is such a plan.

        Exportation of PGP and similar “strong encryption” in the 90s was considered as exporting munitions by the DoD.

        it was not until almost two decades later that the US began to move some of the most common encryption technologies off the Munitions List. Without these changes, it would have been virtually impossible to secure commercial transactions online, stifling the then-nascent internet economy.

        More recently you can take your pick.

        Governments DO NOT like people having encryption that isn’t backdoored. CSAM is literally the “but won’t someone think of the children” justification they use, and while the goals may be admirable in this case, the potential harm of succeeding in their quest to ban consumer-accessible strong encryption seems pretty obvious to me.

        As a bonus - anyone remember Truecrypt?

        https://cointelegraph.com/news/rhodium-enterprises-bitcoin-usd-loan-bankruptcy

        https://www.csoonline.com/article/547356/microsoft-subnet-encryption-canary-or-insecure-app-truecrypt-warning-says-use-microsoft-s-bitlocker.html