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Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France (www.tf1info.fr)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

156 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(Cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/26559848/)

Some significant news for Telegram users!

See this article for some interesting backstory context on Pavel Durov and Telegram: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-telegram-billionaire-and-his-dark-empire-a-f27cb79f-86ae-48de-bdbd-8df604d07cc8

Since the post article is in French, here's an auto-translation:

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the encrypted messaging service Telegram, was arrested around 8 p.m. on Saturday evening as he got off his private jet on the tarmac of Le Bourget airport. The 39-year-old Franco-Russian was accompanied by his bodyguard and a woman.

The arrest was carried out by the gendarmes of the GTA (Air Transport Gendarmerie). Registered in the RPF (wanted persons file), Pavel Durov came straight from Azerbaijan. He had over his head a French search warrant issued by the OFMIN of the National Directorate of the French Judicial Police, issued on the basis of a preliminary investigation.

Why was he under threat of a search warrant?

The Justice considers that the lack of moderation, cooperation with the police and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) makes it complicit in drug trafficking, paedophile offences and fraud.

This search warrant ran if, and only if, Pavel Durov was on national territory. "He made a mistake tonight. We don't know why... Was this flight just a step? In any case, he's locked up!" a source close to the investigation told TF1/LCI. Since he knew he was persona non grata in France, Pavel Durov used to travel to the Emirates, the countries of the former USSR, South America... He travelled very little in Europe and avoided countries where Telegram is under surveillance.

And now?

Investigators from the ONAF (National Anti-Fraud Office attached to the Customs Directorate) notified him and placed him in police custody. He is expected to be presented to an investigating judge this Saturday evening before a possible indictment on Sunday for a multitude of offences: terrorism, drugs, complicity, fraud, money laundering, concealment, paedophile content...

"Pavel Durov will end up in pre-trial detention, that's for sure," comments an investigator to TF1/LCI. "On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of misdemeanours and crimes to be committed for which he does nothing to moderate or cooperate," said a source close to the case.

His pre-trial detention at the end of his indictment is indeed in no doubt. Pavel Durov, a billionaire, has substantial means to flee and his guarantees of representation will hardly convince the judges.

A net with international resonance

For the investigators, this international sweep has various objectives. First, it makes it possible to kick the anthill, impress and deter the perpetrators of crimes and offences who exchange, until now, freely on Telegram. Secondly, they aim to put pressure on European countries to step up joint work to make secure messaging on terrorist cases bend.

Indeed, Telegram is a hive of criminal content. At the moment, the platform is in the news with the illegal broadcasting of Ligue 1 matches. But on this encrypted messaging service, many accounts are used by organized crime. Beyond terrorism, the most dangerous pedophiles communicate on Telegram to exchange content. "It has become for years THE number 1 platform for organized crime," comments an investigator.

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[–] [email protected] 155 points 4 months ago (6 children)

I don't care much for the guy, but the fact he gets arrested for the service is a bad sign for private messaging in Europe.

[–] Corvid 88 points 4 months ago (17 children)

Telegram is not private messaging.

[–] takeda 47 points 4 months ago (5 children)

To add to that. Russian government was demanding to be able to access messages or will ban Telegram in the country.

Did not hear anything beyond that, but Telegram continues to operate there.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Durov was travelling to France from Azerbaijan, where he had been meeting with Putin. There's a theory that he basically surrendered to the French authorities so as to avoid retaliation for saying no to Putin too many times.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Where did you read about a meeting with Putin?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That’s wild. Remember where you read that?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Russia banned Telegram, everyone (incl. the government) continued to use it, Russia unbanned Telegram - that's how it looks from here. A government official told me Telegram being unbanned was just a matter of time when it was still banned.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There wasn't any legal ban. RosCommNadzor slowed down TG like they recently did with YT (it can barely load a music track without VPN) without any court decision because they can, it went for a week or so, and then it was lifted. Nobody knows why, but there is a suspicion that TG started to cooperate with russian authorities, in a non-automatical manual manner. Some suspect it was a PR campaign to make it as popular as it is now.

It didn't leak stuff as far as I know, that's done by bots like Глаз Бога that accunulate all info on a person and frequently used in OSINT and deanon\bullying, but blocking popular bots and channels that are too annoying to Russia is what they do. From the top of my head: CleverVoting (Умное Голосование, УГ) channels from Navalny's team*, channels for cooperation of protest of soldiers' wives, separatist channels from Bashkortostan and other places. I've seen iranians also posted that they had their protest channels banned - and Iran and Russia banned free and popular VPNs at the same time, spoiling their cooperation.

* Durov's public comment on that gave birth to a meme. He implied that there are just two ways: either banning it from TG or having TG banned on the whole territory of Russian Federation. As a copypasta it was transformed millions of times, and if it hasn't lost it relevance, we could've probably seen a boykisser version of it.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

I think it's even more of a French thing than an EU thing. France is known for implementing censorship and stuff recently.

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[–] [email protected] 84 points 4 months ago (47 children)

Telegram is good for citizen journalism (like what's going on on the ground in Gaza and Ukraine), funny videos and memes, tech support, and casual conversation. Never privacy though.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The fact that governments want to shut down Telegram and arrest its founder shows that Telegram is pretty good for privacy.

[–] Tangent5280 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Why not both? Telegram is bad for privacy, and governments still want to arrest the founders of systems they cannot control?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

I wouldn't go that far

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

What should be alarming is what thus means for other services. Can you get arrested for running a Matrix server in France? It seems like this is very slippery

I personally don't like Telegram as it is centralized, not private and is to close to the Russian government. However, it should be allowed to exist.

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[–] [email protected] 68 points 4 months ago (8 children)

This is a global push to destroy systems the government's can't control. He fact he was arrested says everything.

[–] SpaceMan9000 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

He was not arrested for privacy, there are huge open groups on Telegram for piracy, csam and cyber criminals.

These groups are not encrypted, everything is stored in plain text on their servers. He is being arrested for not removing/moderating this content.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

Well, he caused this himself in the end, he failed to deliver on the part of secure and private messaging because default chats are insecure and secret chats are a buggy joke. If he delivered in the promise of providing a real secure and private messenger and did real effort to fight against spam, then things mind have turned out differently. Decentralization should also have been part of it.

In the end, he chose for fancy features instead.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

"Sure".

[–] strlght 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How so? Telegram isn't a great choice if you're looking for privacy: E2EE is disabled in 1-on-1 chats by default in Telegram, so it's technically possible for Telegram employees to read majority of messages sent on their platform. Group chats and channels have no E2EE at all.

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[–] doodledup 26 points 4 months ago (11 children)

Why is this posted here? Telegram is not a private or secure messenger.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is a actually pretty worrying

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (3 children)

This is a actually pretty worrying

Why?

Telegram is not an encrypted platform, so they're not going after him for providing end-to-end encrypted services. They're going after him because they have full insight into what's going on in their platform and not taking appropriate action and in some cases completely ignoring it. It's pretty common that if you're providing a public platform that you comply with authorities. Signal doesn't have this problem, they have no insight into anything their user base is doing; you can't be asked to enforce things you can't see.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

So you want so start seeing platforms practice mass censorship? That's what's going to happen as they aren't going to take on risk.

What's worse is that spells the end of the fediverse and smaller hosted media. The admins who are bold enough to host a Lemmy or Mastodon instance are eventually going to get taken by authorities. It doesn't matter what country they are in. Admins can't moderate everything and there will always be content that is illegal somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

So you want so start seeing platforms practice mass censorship? That’s what’s going to happen as they aren’t going to take on risk.

Platforms are already not taking a risk and practice mass censorship. This is why you have words like "unalive" and "grape" becoming part of the American lexicon. It's not even nefarious. Advertisers don't want their content near negative content so platforms (without being asked by their government) auto-enforce these kind of policies.

What’s worse is that spells the end of the fediverse and smaller hosted media.

Serious doubt. All the fediverse has to do is comply with the law when asked, it really is that simple. Telegram was specifically not complying with the law, which is why illegal content is so easy to find on there, and thus why they were being targeted.

Admins can’t moderate everything and there will always be content that is illegal somewhere.

Frankly, if you can't keep your house in order, you're not taking your responsibility seriously enough. Nobody's forcing lemmy, mastodon, peertube, pixelfed, etc admins to give free accounts to more people than they can manage.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The law will then say E2EE is forbidden. And then the next step is making Telegram as a prime example to strip out E2EE because "Look how many bad guys we can catch without E2EE".

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Telegram never was and never will be a secure messaging platform. Anyone using it as a such is an idiot.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (3 children)

You know you are an authoritarian country when you arrest CEOs of messaging apps.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (4 children)

But's not just a messaging app. Telegram is a public forum (non-private and unencrypted btw) where they know crimes are being committed and are taking no action to mitigate them.

If you let people commit crimes in your house you are a criminal. If you own a mall and let people commit crimes in it, you are a criminal. If you own a boat and let people commit crimes in it you are a criminal. Same concept here. Pavel Durov created a public forum and not only allows crime to happen, but lies to people telling them its secure and private.

If I were a tinfoil wearing kind of person, I'd think Pavel was in on the whole thing and helping some 3-letter agency because Telegram has been a "privacy" scam from the beginning and it seems criminals are too dumb to realize they fell for playbook similar to Anom, just on a bigger scale.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Durov, as a citizen of France, recently sent them away when they asked for access, and then flew to them to test the strength of democracy. Imbecility and courage.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

He just left Azerbaijan after meeting with Putin. I think he decided he'd be safer in French custody.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Source?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (4 children)

There are open groups on Telegram in which people post that they want to see person XY dead... Everyone who joins the open group can read it anyway.

They decided not to moderate this and not to delete illegal content once reported, although it's easily possible without breaking encryption.

IMO, this has not much to do with privacy.

This is like posting that we should kill someone on Reddit and nothing is happening.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It still isn't a great future to look forward to

Does that mean that French Lemmy admins are now liable for everything that is said by others? That seems like a huge liability and it is impossible for them to catch everything. Also what happens if someone criticizes the French government? Do they have the power to have random comments removed?

[–] SpaceMan9000 12 points 4 months ago

If they receive a notice that there is illegal content, that it should be removed and then refuse to cooperate?

Then yes, e2e is not under fire, not cooperating in moderating/Removing known criminals is

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago

This is like posting that we should kill someone on Reddit and nothing is happening.

Have you been there in early 2022? Tons of "we must exterminate Russians". Or in 2015 or so, go to /Europe, see what they say about migrants. You might wanna lower that high horse of yours

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