Pavlov Durov, co-founder of Telegram, has been arrested in France. The arrest is raising many serious questions.
It was a story that first surfaced yesterday. French authorities have arrested Telegram co-founder, Pavel Durov, someone who happens to have citizenship in both France and Russia. The problem is that this is where the certainty ends. The questions begin as to just why he was arrested. This is where the rumours and speculation begins.
Canadian broadcast media, no doubt getting their information from other national reporting organizations, speculated that he was arrested because of illegal content appearing on his platform. By the end of the day, those broadcasters began accusing Telegram of being “controversial”, seemingly jumping to the conclusion that this was the reason and already beginning the process of demonizing the platform despite colleagues using the encrypted nature of the platform.
That speculation by mainstream media trickled onto online publications as well. From Al Jazeera:
Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov was detained at the Paris-Le Bourget airport on Saturday, after arriving by a private plane from Baku, Azerbaijan.
He is accused of having failed to moderate criminal activity on the platform.
If that speculation is accurate, that’s… pretty messed up. If there is criminal activity on a platform, what good does it do to arrest the co-founder of the platform anyway? It’s not like Telegram is the only game in town when it comes to being a communication platform. What’s more, if the encrypted nature of person to person communication is the problem, Telegram is far from the only game in town on that front. Even if Telegram was a major source of criminal activity, and arresting the co-founder is going to disrupt that criminal activity, do you really think that criminals won’t, you know, move to a different communication platform? In that scenario, congratulations French authorities of accomplishing literally nothing while giving people reasons to be upset at you.
This isn’t even getting into the fact that it’s really hard to pin the criminal activity on the co-founder in the first place. Unless he was personally involved in said criminal activity, the idea of arresting someone who helped to create a platform for the actions of its users is insanely stupid. You’re literally blaming someone for the actions of others which makes absolutely no sense.
Some of the speculation is that he didn’t do enough to moderate illegal material on his platform. At that point, the question is, what constitutes “doing enough” in the first place? Further, how does failure to moderate content translate to criminal charges anyway? Unless Durov was personally involved in said criminal activity, I have a real hard time trying to square that circle.
One possibility that does arise, even if it’s a bit of a roundabout reason, is that the platform allows users to communicate, one on one, in an encrypted manner. It is no secret that spy agencies, internationally, have been pushing for a ban on effective encryption and saying that all encryption employed by the public must be broken so government can access every message and communication in a 1984-esque world where people have no right to privacy at all. Governments like the UK and Canada have been pushing anti-encryption laws in an effort to ban effective security for the sake of ubiquitous surveillance on everyone. If this arrest was about the encryption that is available on the platform, that would raise the possibility that the arrest was politically motivated – not to mention useless because Telegram isn’t the only game in town when it comes to encrypted messaging.
This circles back to the questions surrounding the nature of Durov’s arrest. Did Durov personally do anything that broke the law? If not, it’s hard to really think of why he is being arrested. I know Mike Masnick of TechDirt is also wondering why the heck Durov was arrested as well:
The problem is, without more details, we have no idea what is actually being charged and what his alleged responsibility is. After all, we’ve seen other cases where people have been charged with sex trafficking, when the reality was that was just how law enforcement spun a refusal to hand over data on users.
On top of that, leaping to criminal charges against an exec over civil penalties for a company… seems strange. For that to make any sense, someone should need to show actual criminal behavior by Durov, and not just “his service hosted bad stuff.”
The head of OFMIN, the French police agency that issued the warrant, posted to LinkedIn (of all places) that: “At the heart of this issue is the lack of moderation and cooperation of the platform (which has nearly 1 billion users), particularly in the fight against paedophilia.” Again, that is frightfully unclear. Is it just that Telegram wasn’t doing enough to fight CSAM? And if so, what “lack of moderation and cooperation” is enough? Because lots of websites are accused (often unfairly) of not doing enough in the fight against CSAM. Or is there something more?
And if it was just that they weren’t “cooperating” does it make sense to jump straight to criminal charges against the CEO, rather than penalties and fines for the company?
It sounds potentially worrisome, because if it’s really just “well, they refused to take down what we wanted,” that would be a dangerous attack on free speech. But if it’s “Durov himself was actively involved in the creation of and the sharing of illegal content,” then it could be trickier. And there’s a wide spectrum in between.
I will note that, over on Twitter, Elon’s fans are insisting that this is a test run before officials arrest Elon, but that seems ridiculously unlikely.
Also, I have to remind folks that a little over two decades ago, France also put out an arrest warrant on Yahoo CEO Tim Koogle, charging him as a war criminal, because Yahoo’s auction site in the US (notably, not the French version) allowed people to sell Nazi memorabilia. Eventually he was acquitted. You would hope in the two decades since then that officials would be a bit more sophisticated about this stuff, but at this moment, it’s just not clear at all.
Indeed, there is definitely the potential that this could be a pretty scary attack on free speech. If the speculation is true and this really was just arresting someone because a platform didn’t do everything authorities ask of it, then that puts a major chill on anyone wanting to create a company that focuses on the privacy of users in the first place.
What’s more, even the BBC is wondering what is going on with the arrest:
The headline in a Russian newspaper summed up the story: “The arrest (or detention) of ‘Russia’s Zuckerberg’, Pavel Durov, is one of the most important, but mysterious global news stories,” declared Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
True.
Except that “mysterious” is a bit of an understatement.
Why did French police detain him? What charges will he face? Has it anything at all to do with his recent visit to Azerbaijan, where he met (or didn’t meet) Russian President Vladimir Putin?
For two days, reporters have quoted “sources close to the investigation” about the offences Pavel Durov may be charged with (allegedly, from complicity in drug-trafficking to fraud). Telegram put out a statement saying Mr Durov had “nothing to hide”.
On Monday evening, the Paris prosecutor said in a statement that Mr Durov was being held in custody as part of a cyber-criminality investigation.
The statement mentioned 12 different offences under investigation that it said were linked to organised crime.
These included illicit transactions, child pornography, fraud and the refusal to disclose information to authorities, the prosecutor said.
The statement added that Mr Durov’s time in custody had been extended and could now last until Wednesday.
Without going into detail, President Emmanuel Macron posted on social media that he had seen “false information” regarding France following Mr Durov’s arrest, and added: “This is in no way a political decision. It is up to the judges to decide.”
The story has echo’s of the stories of Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload and Julian Assange of Wikileaks. Dotcom was arrested because his website became successful in the cyberlocker era of the internet even though the site was in compliance with US DMCA takedown laws (this without the blessing of American based billionaires). Assange was arrested after his transparency website grew far too politically inconvenient for establishment political parties like Republicans, Democrats, etc. It’s concerning that this slow trend is potentially continuing with another online innovator as well. Let’s hope the list of digital martyrs isn’t continuing to grow.
Dotcom was charged because he was paying people to get pirated media up on Megaupload. Assange engaged in assisting the hacking of systems and was essentially a Russian asset in helping Trump get elected. Durov lets the Russian Army coordinate their attacks on Ukraine and lets CSAM peddlers have free reign on the service while refusing to cooperate with authorities.
None of these people are the heroes you paint them to be.