The Telegram Detainment Investigation: A Public Defender and a National Defender of Privacy and Information Security in France (Journal Press Release)

In a statement, Telegram has responded to the detainment saying it is “absurd” to hold Durov responsible for people who abuse the platform, noting that the app abides by all European Union laws.

Durov was arrested at the Le Bourget Airport in northern France after disembarking from his private jet.

On July 8, the investigation began and involves a wide range of charges, including money laundering, violations related to import and export of encryption tools, refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, and possession and distribution of child pornography.

The lack of moderation and cooperation of the platform is at the crux of the case, according to a police official in France. “Particularly in the fight against child pornography.”

Telegram sometimes takes action on illegal content. An official Telegram channel called ‘Stop Child Abuse’ claims that the platform blocks more than one thousand channels a day in response to user reports after reports from the media about child abuse.

Fishman wrote on Threads that Telegram has ignored requests from law enforcement to look into terror groups and child pornography.

Pavel Durov has crafted a brash pro-privacy persona in public. In an interview with Tucker Carlson this year, Durov gave examples of times that Telegram has declined to hand over data to governments: when Russia asked for information on protesters, for instance, and when US lawmakers requested data on participants in the January 6th Capitol riot. Earlier, at a 2015 TechCrunch event, Durov said that Telegram’s commitment to privacy was “more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism.”

The investigation was initiated by “Section J3” cybercrime prosecutors and has involved collaboration with France’s Centre for the Fight against Cybercrime (C3N) and Anti-Fraud National Office (ONAF), according to the press release. It is in the framework in which the investigators questioned Durov, according to the statement.

Lavite says the case raises a lot of questions about the balance between users’ protection and free speech on the one hand and encrypting communications on the other. But she notes that there is a lot of information about the investigation that is unknown and “a lot of blurry zones still.”

What should we learn from Telegram after the Anomaly? Law professor Florence G’sell discusses the legal status of end-to-end encryption

On Monday afternoon, Telegram seemed to be receiving a download boost from the situation, moving from 18th to 8th place in Apple’s US App Store apps ranking. In France the app was number one in the App Store social network category, and third overall, despite the fact that downloads were up by 4 percent.

Durov has raised the question of what should push a platform into legal liability. Serious crimes certainly occur on Facebook and nearly every other massive social network, and in at least some cases, somebody at the company was warned and failed to take action. It’s possible Durov was clearly, directly involved in a criminal conspiracy — but short of that, how ineffectual can a company’s moderation get before its CEO is detained the next time they set foot on European soil?

That sentiment isn’t radically out of step with what many encryption proponents believe, since strong encryption must protect all users. Everyones privacy is compromised by a door targeting one guilty party. The sender and recipient cannot see the contents of a message in end-to-end encryption apps. But as experts have pointed out, Telegram doesn’t implement this in any meaningful sense. End-to-end encryption has to be enabled manually for one-on-one messaging, and it doesn’t work for group chats or public channels where illegal activity occurs in plain view.

European and US police have increasingly targeted encrypted chat platforms used by criminals in recent years, hacking a platform called EncroChat and even going as far as to secretly run an encrypted phone company called Anom. Notably, those platforms were focused on serving criminals. Telegram, on the other hand, is aimed at the general public. In his interview with Carlson, Durov claimed that at one point, the FBI — which played a key role in the Anom operation — attempted to convince Telegram to include a surveillance backdoor.

In posts on X, University of Lorraine law professor Florence G’sell noted that the most serious charges against Durov are the ones alleging direct criminal conspiracy and a refusal to cooperate with the police. The charges around declaring tech for import look like minor offenses. (Notably, in the United States, certain import / export controls on encryption have been found to be violations of the First Amendment.) G’sell pointed out that there are still unknowns surrounding which criminal codes Durov could be charged with, but that the key issue seems to be knowingly providing tech to criminals.

Source: Telegram’s CEO has taken a hands-off approach for years — now his luck might have run out

Telegram: A safe haven for crooks, terrorists, and their collaborators in the 21st century, and what they can do about it

Telegram is a messaging app that was founded in 2013 by brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov. While it’s sometimes portrayed as an “encrypted chat app,” it’s mostly popular as a semi-public communication service like Discord, particularly in countries like Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and India.

It is a large platform used by millions of innocent people everyday, but it also has a reputation of being a safe haven for crooks and terrorists.