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Was the Arrest of Telegram's CEO Inevitable? (platformer.news) 174

Casey Newton, former senior editor at the Verge, weighs in on Platformer about the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

"Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly. Telegram never even pretended to." Officially, Telegram's terms of service prohibit users from posting illegal pornographic content or promotions of violence on public channels. But as the Stanford Internet Observatory noted last year in an analysis of how CSAM spreads online, these terms implicitly permit users who share CSAM in private channels as much as they want to. "There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?" asks a question on Telegram's FAQ page. The company declares that it will not intervene in any circumstances: "All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants," it states. "We do not process any requests related to them...."

Telegram can look at the contents of private messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for that data. Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says) none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data. [...] To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM.... The company's refusal to answer almost any law enforcement request, no matter how dire, has enabled some truly vile behavior. "Telegram is another level," Brian Fishman, Meta's former anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. "It has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It's not 'light' content moderation; it's a different approach entirely.

The article asks whether France's action "will embolden countries around the world to prosecute platform CEOs criminally for failing to turn over user data." On the other hand, Telegram really does seem to be actively enabling a staggering amount of abuse. And while it's disturbing to see state power used indiscriminately to snoop on private conversations, it's equally disturbing to see a private company declare itself to be above the law.

Given its behavior, a legal intervention into Telegram's business practices was inevitable. But the end of private conversation, and end-to-end encryption, need not be.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Was the Arrest of Telegram's CEO Inevitable?

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  • Those in power who want to censor the people have never been the good guys. Not once. This is about controlling speech because, if they can do that, there will be no limit to the power they wield.

    • by dnaumov ( 453672 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @10:41AM (#64753404)

      Must be nice to be THIS removed from the real world and actual human history.

      • by AleRunner ( 4556245 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:20AM (#64753462)

        Let's just give two well known examples.

        Before the D day landings, which were what freed France from the Nazis, most information about movements of troops in the UK was censored. This meant that it took Hitler days to accept that the D day landings were the main force and gave the allies time to

        Information about the breaking of the Enigma code was censored and restricted absolutely both during WWII and afterwards. During the war this allowed the allies to continue to break German codes without the Germans realizing and allowed them to destroy the U-boat fleet which would otherwise have made supplying the UK from the US almost impossible and have vastly lengthened the war. More ambiguously, after the war this allowed the allies to keep selling Enigma as a valid encryption technology.

        • by sinij ( 911942 )

          Let's just give two well known examples.

          These examples of temporary restrictions due to war-time measures. It works similarly to classifying some information as secret. Is France at war (with Internet) today? Because otherwise your examples are not applicable.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Those in power who want to censor the people have never been the good guys. Not once.

      Go and look up why the epidemic last century was called the "Spanish" flu.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. They may be using some pretexts (a.k.a. "lies") now to mask what they really desire, but in the end it is always about the suppression of ideas and criticism of those in power.

    • Those in power who want to censor the people have never been the good guys. Not once.

      So the USA were the bad guys in WWII? I ask because censorship was in wide use by all levels of government in the US for the duration.

    • Russian military uses Telegram extensively. This is very likely France disrupting them.

      Telegram's CEO is a billionaire. Once you're at that level you're in the Big Club George Carlin talked about. They have class solidarity and take care of their own.

      There's really only two things that'll break that. One is if you go after one of your own. Like Bernie Madoff did or Liz Holmes.

      And the second is foreign policy.
      • by edis ( 266347 )

        Your subject is correct.
        Pavel Durov had intense cooperation with ruZZia, flying there many times upon important moments, while he declares super-secrecy in his advertisement.

    • Unfortunately, there will always be secrets that governments need to keep. Whether that is stealing technology (look up Alexander Hamilton), or hiding capabilities from opponents. In addition there are some forms of 'free speech' which most people find unacceptable such as incitement to violence or child pornography. So we can never have completely free speech.

      However, in the modern era where computers, and soon AI, can be used to monitor vast volumes of 'free speech' there the risk that this can be misuse

    • That is true even when they think they are the good guys. Freedom of speech is something I saw vanishing in online communities in the late 1980s. It has gotten progressively worse like boiling a lobster. Now it is a fact in Britain where you cannot insult or mention the misdeeds of members of the Muhammadan religion. It is now a fact when you cannot mention that a German legislator is fat without spending time behind bars. It's marginally legal here in the US where it's thugs who enforce their viewpoints vi

  • because Big Brother wants to see everything, and since pedos and various criminals were using Telegram to ply their illicit activities it was inevitable, i don't care because i don't do anything felonious, i am sure some privacy advocates will rant about it and i won't care about that either
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • i don't care because i don't do anything felonious

      I'm assuming you also probably live in a country with relatively decent human rights protections. Privacy is more important for say, people who are LGBTQ+ in one of those shithole countries where such a thing is still punishable by death.

  • Same old (Score:2, Insightful)

    by buck-yar ( 164658 )
    Sounds like they want backdoors, and this is the newest incarnation of the attack on anyone that doesn't bend the knee. Phil Zimmerman 2.0
    • Sounds like they want backdoors

      There is nothing to back door. The issue here isn't end-to-end encryption, the issue here is a company without encryption publicly hosting content that literally every other social / chat platform would take down on request or hand over non-encrypted data to law enforcement.

      Backdoor implies they are going after encryption which simply isn't the case.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Not sure about the morals of that guy, but this is definitely an attempt to force backdoors.

  • by MpVpRb ( 1423381 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @10:46AM (#64753416)

    Making it more difficult to communicate to other evil people does not eliminate the evil

    • by sinij ( 911942 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:22AM (#64753466)

      Making it more difficult to communicate to other evil people does not eliminate the evil

      It is much worse than that. Making it more difficult for everyone to communicate makes the evil more likely to go undetected.

    • Making it more difficult to communicate to other evil people does not eliminate the evil

      It's not about difficulty to communicate, it's literally about taking down illegal content that is publicly shared unencrypted in a group. Plenty of platforms have evil people communicating via encryption, they also don't hand over data, and they are not being prosecuted. Think about why for a second.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Got a reference for that? Because that is not what I read so far. I may have overlooked something. Or not.

        • TFS would be a good start for you to read.

          • by gweihir ( 88907 )

            So you do not. Figures.

          • something you could have easily cut and pasted without leaving the page

            but you didnt

            we can easily see why because we can also try to cut and paste the text you say exits, but for some strange reason, this web page doesn't agree with the claims you are making about this web page
    • by dnaumov ( 453672 )

      Having murder codified as a crime does not eliminate murder, yet here we are.

    • People aren't born evil & people aren't evil per se, i.e. it evil behaviour under certain circumstances (See the fundamental attribution error: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]) Some people do tend to end up doing evil things given the appropriate conditions, e.g. being able to easily access opportunities to commit crimes with a low perceived risk of consequences, for example accessing CSAM online.

      By providing low risk opportunities to commit evil acts, they're in fact propagating evil. Basic psycho
  • by billyswong ( 1858858 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @10:50AM (#64753426)

    In the old days, it is easy for the authority to wiretap one person, but hard to wiretap everyone. Now it is all or nothing. Either the authority can wiretap nobody within these online platforms, or they wiretap everyone, put them in big data analysis, and arrest anyone who dare oppose the authority.

    Either we find some way to flip the technology back to the old balance, or we have to choose between "Big Brother Is Watching You" dystopia or communication heaven for various criminal groups.

    I treasure freedom of speech and democracy more. Giving up freedom of speech and democracy is not a solution of crimes. The authority can be the biggest threat to civilian safety, even though they will never let outsiders label themselves as criminals.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:20AM (#64753458)

        I have served in the US Military (specifically, the US Army) to defend that particular freedom, among others.

        Defend it from whom? By all indications the only people threatening American democracy are other Americans.

        • by sinij ( 911942 )
          Defending it from the bad guys that hate our democracy, that whom. Now, your internet license is suspended until you voluntarily take AI-directed only disinformation re-education class, citizen.
          • Comment removed based on user account deletion
            • by sinij ( 911942 )
              Legitimate only in sense that France made laws that make free speech illegal. It is totalitarianism to make such laws and it is expression of totalitarianism to prosecute Durov under these laws. It is no any different from censorship laws in China or Russia or Brazil.
            • We know, you are a good little lapdog.

              Next.

            • Freedom of speech, is so intertwined with freedom of thought, so as to make it a natural right in and of itself. The only thing that is unlawful per se, is using the speech as a means to commit some other separate crime, and not the speech itself or its mental or emotional effects, as the forbidden effect.

      • by Okian Warrior ( 537106 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:42AM (#64753518) Homepage Journal

        I have served in the US Military (specifically, the US Army) to defend that particular freedom, among others. What have you done to preserve freedom? And please, your use of the new Silk Road to "stick it to the man" doesn't count.

        I use my slashdot mod points to turn the volume down on trolling and flamebait. I specifically look for insulting comments with no insight or informational content.

        And there are a *lot* of these. It's surprising how popular a straight-up insult of a hated individual will be; for example, Elon Musk.

        That's about all I can manage for this issue. There are a lot of ills in the world and I am actively making efforts for one of these, using my core competence, and it's for a particular ill that I might be able to help.

        Not everyone has to expend effort in every field. I, for one, have no interest in anything climate related: it's too hard to sort through the noise to get to the signal, life's too short, I just don't give a fuck. I don't worry about Hamas versus IDF, either. I hear there's a difference between the two, but smarter people are handling it and I just can't be eff'd to give a damn.

        My point here is that not everyone needs to be maximally virtuous in all possible ways. If you want to have a positive effect on the world, choose *one* aspect that appeals to you and concentrate on that. Focus on choices that lead to physical actions you can take.

        The problem with military service is that, beyond the initial choice to serve, once you enlist all your choices are taken away from you. You don't have to think, you don't have to choose, you do what you're told for the duration. I also note that in my younger years *avoiding* military service was seen as defending your freedom. They even made a movie [wikipedia.org] about the practice.

        So I don't really see how that single choice you made - to serve in the Army - was all that important to defending freedom of speech.

        Most of the rights violations we see in this nation come from within, and the Army doesn't defend against that.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        You mean you did believe the pretext given to you? Congratulations, you got scammed.

      • The US Military is not abut "defending freedom", its about exerting power, your job is to "uphold the laws and constitution of the united states", but that constitution is about "defending freedom", but defining it, i.e. X is free from Y to do / not do Z.

    • In the old days, it is easy for the authority to wiretap one person, but hard to wiretap everyone. Now it is all or nothing. Either the authority can wiretap nobody within these online platforms, or they wiretap everyone, put them in big data analysis, and arrest anyone who dare oppose the authority.

      Either we find some way to flip the technology back to the old balance, or we have to choose between "Big Brother Is Watching You" dystopia or communication heaven for various criminal groups.

      The contradiction is that even if you're willing to make that trade-off it's not actually your choice.

      In this case, that choice belongs to the people of France. From the summary:

      To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept

      • Remember 9/11? A few law enforcement screw-ups, and airport security weaker than it should have been, and the outcome was a massive law enforcement overreach and ridiculous new levels of airport security.

        Now imagine another 9/11 got organized on Telegram. Now you're not just losing Telegram, you're having major portions of the public grab those encryption keys and shove them into the waiting hands of the government.

        If you treasure freedom of speech and democracy then you need some reasonable restrictions to avoid a big incident that triggers a major backlash.

        It's possible to both have broad protections for speech while giving the government the right to unveil certain speech subject to oversight. It requires vigilance on part of the people, but the balance is possible.

        The extremist position proposed by Telegram? That only lasts as long as it takes for things to blow up (possibly literally) and then you won't like the new normal.

        As written in my original post, the only way to avoid being "extremist" is through technology advances / regressions. With current tech level, we are stuck. The 9/11 style disaster is bound to happen again by Murphy's law. Either we invent some magic tech to regain the balance via technical means, or we try our best to advocate / educate people from falling into the trap.

        I remember there are a number of reports after 9/11, showing the security agencies did get traces and evidences of those terrorists wer

        • As written in my original post, the only way to avoid being "extremist" is through technology advances / regressions. With current tech level, we are stuck. The 9/11 style disaster is bound to happen again by Murphy's law. Either we invent some magic tech to regain the balance via technical means, or we try our best to advocate / educate people from falling into the trap.

          Think of it like immigration. Even if you believe completely open borders are the moral thing to do, if you somehow had the power to flip that switch they would also be the dumb thing to do. People would freak out and you'd get a counter-reaction that leads to a more restrictive system than before. The best play is to figure out the best system you think can stick, and in this case, that system isn't a major app like Telegram offering a fully encrypted law-enforcement proof chat room for terrorists.

          I don't

  • Bad guys eat cheese and do bad things. Therefore, cheese is enabling a staggering amount of abuse.

    These "enabling" arguments make no sense, it is not designed for the sole purpose of facilitate abuse, therefore it is perpetrators of the abuse and not the platform that is responsible for the abuse. For example, if your product is a platform for delivering and managing malicious payloads then you may be responsible for enabling the abuse. If your product is a remote desktop management platform, but scammers
  • by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:23AM (#64753472)

    is that you also have to allow unsavory free speech, involving pedophilia, Nazi propaganda and whatever else. The minute you try to curb the latter, you kill the former because you make an arbitrary judgment call on what speech is acceptable and what isn't.

    And France has a horrible track record in the matter: there are laws on the book in France that will have holocaust deniers and Nazi propagandist do hard time. I don't like Nazis anymore than pedos, but I like anti-censorship laws even less.

    Free speech has been a lost cause in France since the end of WW2. The Telegram CEO really should have known better than to set foot in France.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by sinij ( 911942 )
        Durov was living and working in the United Arab Emirates as he fled Russia for the same reasons he was arrested in France. It is really sad day when UAE is more tolerant of free speech than France.
        • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @12:21PM (#64753604)
          Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • by Saffaya ( 702234 )

            France having no freedom of speech has everything to do with freedom of speech.

            • France has freedom of speech. It just has a couple of specific carve-outs, none of them which are relevant here since this is not a freedom of speech issue.

              Freedom of speech doesn't magically mean you don't have to obey other laws.

          • How does that follow? Some speech is illegal (eg verbally offering to pay someone to murder you), but being illegal doesn't make it not be speech.

            And there is no limit to the number of laws that can restrict speech, eg laws against blasphemy or offending the king or telling an enemy your nation's troop movements; for good or ill every nation on Earth bans certain speech, usually by calling it something other than speech. Durov's crime is publishing illegal speech on his server plus not removing it.

            • Some speech is illegal (eg verbally offering to pay someone to murder you), but being illegal doesn't make it not be speech.

              No one has been arrested for "speech". Literally this has nothing to do with freedom of speech. Go read the list of charges from your favourite news site.

              • Isn't that what I said? A thing that is communication (aka speech), but is called something other than speech. Every single charge, with possible but unlikely exception of money laundering.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      is that you also have to allow unsavory free speech, involving pedophilia, Nazi propaganda and whatever else. The minute you try to curb the latter, you kill the former because you make an arbitrary judgment call on what speech is acceptable and what isn't.

      That is also a core reason why it is so easy to kill free speech. Too many people are not intellectually capable enough to understand this blatantly obvious and historically nicely documented mechanism.

    • by test321 ( 8891681 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @01:57PM (#64753794)

      Freedom of speech in France has always known limits.

      See the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August 1789), of supra-constitutional value in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      "Article IV -- Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others: thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the fruition of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law. "
      "Article XI -- The free communication of thoughts and of opinions is one of the most precious rights of man: any citizen thus may speak, write, print freely, except to respond to the abuse of this liberty, in the cases determined by the law."

      Therefore insults, libel, death threats were always prohibited as they directly harm others. Insulting the dead is also prohibited (formally since 1881).

      The reason that you cannot, in France, promote the Nazi propaganda the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg) declared the Nazi party a criminal organization. Same thing as you cannot promote murder or the Mafia, by the principle that it is intended to cause harm to people, and is therefore outside the limits of Liberty as defined by the foundational declaration of 1789. By the same rationale, antisemitism and racism being intended to harm others, these are ideologies you cannot promote (except, I believe, a deputy addressing the National Assembly, otherwise they wouldn't be able to remove any previous limitation). You discuss them scholarly. You can write a book showing a balanced vision of Communism, Sharia Law. You can republish Mein Kampf. You can discuss ideas; you cannot promote them when they harm people.

      A more legal explanation can be found in a decision of the Constitutional Council (the supreme level in France). It refers to the Nuremberg tribiunal and to the 1789 text. See 2015-512 QPC (in French) https://www.conseil-constituti... [conseil-co...tionnel.fr]

    • by untelp ( 757176 )

      Your track record in the matter does not seem to include defending Julian Assange.
      According to the number of pro-free-speech posts here and against-Julian-Assange there, I am wondering if the defence of free speech is really the conviction of such posters, or if some other agenda might be involved.

  • I'm confused (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Artem S. Tashkinov ( 764309 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:29AM (#64753480) Homepage

    So, e.g. when I'm on WhatsApp I can create groups with up to 1024 members, the company cannot snoop on me and I can share absolutely anything without any repercussions.

    In Telegram people can do the same however the company can snoop on them but chooses not to and thus it's been declared to be "above the law".

    How can these two be reconciled? Does it mean that not snooping on your users when you have the means to is illegal? Does "the law" imply the company must actively snoop on its users?

    In no way I'm trying to vindicate Telegram, or Durov, I'm just curious.

    • Re:I'm confused (Score:5, Informative)

      by echo123 ( 1266692 ) on Sunday September 01, 2024 @11:48AM (#64753528)

      Just a semi-educated guess here. I think the answer has to do if there's CSAM or other criminal activity on a server that can be subpoenaed or not. I have no experience with Whatsapp or Telegram, while I use Signal a lot. From Signal's Group Chat documentation, (emphasis is mine):

      A Signal group is built on top of the private group system technology. The Signal service has no record of your group memberships, group titles, group avatars, or group attributes.

      Group features include:

              Invite via a group link or QR-code
              Mentions
              Group descriptions
              Admin controls to remove a member from the group
              Admin controls of who can edit group info and the disappearing message timer
              Admin controls of who can send messages and start calls
              Optional admin approval for members joining by a group link
              Size limit of 1000

      Signal by design retains practically zero user data and besides open-sourcing the software, Signal probably complies with government requests to turn over what little user data they retain on their servers. Telegram retains a lot of data while providing no content moderation and while also ignoring government subpoenas. Whatsapp (Meta) probably complies with subpoenas, keeping them out of the news.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • How can these two be reconciled?

      The same way how Apple can't hand over encryption keys it doesn't have - as stated in US courts. If someone *can* do an action then that action is covered under the laws of the land. If someone *can't* do an action then it renders the laws irrelevant.

      Does it mean that not snooping on your users when you have the means to is illegal?

      Yes in literally every country. Authoritarian nations demand continuous snooping. Democratic nations usually have systems in place governed by the courts - e.g. warrants. To give you a practical example, if you have e.g. text communications or pictures, and you

  • There's been a lot of revelations about Durov lately, some of which are quite staggering:

    There's so much going on that it looks like the general public is once again only allowed to learn bits and piec

  • Inevitable. Therein lies a deep philosophical question. Everything that ever happens was always going to happen, and therefore inevitable.

  • It's hilarious to see the number of people on here acting like the last remaining venue for communicating behind Big Brother's back has fallen. There are lots of technically superior options out there, Telegram just happened to be popular with criminals who weren't smart enough to set up anything less noob-friendly than Signal or Whatsapp, while being technically inferior to those mainstream options in a lot of ways. I think its only practical advantage was for contacting marks for the purpose of pulling sc

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