This just in: French prosecutors have charged Telegram’s Russian-born founder Pavel Durov with a wide range of crimes and banned him from leaving the country. He’s now placed under a heavy judicial control with twice-a-week police check-ins and has to post a €5 million bail, according to a statement by Paris Public Prosecutor Laure Beccuau.
This development marks a major milestone in what seems to be one of this year’s most important technology news stories that started less than a week ago when French authorities arrested Durov at Le Bourget airport outside Paris. Soon after, the prosecutor’s office released a list of charges, which now have been officially brought against Telegram’s founder.
The said list contains 12 items, mostly related to Durov’s alleged complicity in money laundering, drug trafficking, and distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Additionally, there are charges related to refusal to cooperate with authorities on lawful interception requests and providing unlicensed encryption tools. (That last bit appears to refer to a specific French law that requires certification for any cryptography tool imported into the country.
Over the four days since Durov’s arrest, the backlash has been coming in from all the wrong directions. From Elon Musk and American far-right influencers to Russian government representatives and even Kim Dotcom, many people with less-than-spotless reputation seem to be concerned.
Russia and the UAE had also requested consular access to Durov during his time in custody; there’s no information on whether either of them was granted. According to media reports, Durov currently has four passports — of France, Russia, the UAE, and St. Kitts and Nevis.
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What’s Telegram been up to
The issues with Telegram are aplenty. For anyone with any knowledge of the platform’s operations, it’s impossible to deny that Telegram has indeed tolerated terrible things, from trading CSAM to drug dealing to war criminals’ coordination and communication. The amount of mis- and disinformation spread through it has been staggering too.
In addition to that, Durov’s possible connection to Russian secret services is worrisome, although there’s no smoking-gun evidence of its existence. It is, however, already obvious that the image of someone being at odds with the Russian establishment that Durov spent a lot of time building in the 2010s has been heavily undermined.
Take for instance Durov’s flight that brought him to Le Bourget on Saturday. The tech founder travelled there from Azerbaijan, where he had spent a few days; coincidentally, Vladimir Putin was there at the same time. Russian state media were quick to report that Durov sought a meeting with Putin but was turned down — though no sane person would take those reports at face value.
Even more recently, several media outlets reported on an alleged massive leak from Russia’s border service, which, among other things, shows that Durov had visited the country over 60 times between 2015 and 2021. At that time, Telegram’s founder publicly distanced himself from his motherland and actively cultivated the image of a world citizen.
Another part that’s worth mentioning is that Telegram positions itself as an inherently secure, privacy-focused, and encrypted messaging platform. That’s not quite true though, since one-on-one chats are not end-to-end encrypted by default, and group chats and channels can’t be end-to-end encrypted by default. This means that it is technically possible for someone inside the company to read most messages sent on the platform.
At the same time, Telegram without a doubt had been instrumental for citizen communication in Ukraine in the first days and months after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. It was often local grassroots public channels that warned people about missile attacks and Russian troops’ movements before any official media did. Telegram has also been used by dissidents and protesters around the world for communication and coordination.
The enfant terrible
With all that being said, however, it appears that Telegram’s cardinal sin was not what had been happening on the platform per se, but rather its brazen unwillingness to cooperate with law enforcement. In her statement, the prosecutor emphasised the “near total absence of a response” from the company to multiple requests originating from different countries across the EU.
This echoes a particularly pointy comment by Casey Newton in his recent Platformer newsletter: “Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly. Telegram never even pretended to.”
From an objective (and privacy-minded) standpoint, this appears to be one of those unfortunate situations where everyone is in the wrong. Arresting the CEO of a technology company for apparently refusing to disclose data on its users is a dangerous precedent that may have far-reaching consequences.
On the other hand, experience of Telegram’s peers on the market — from Signal to Apple — shows that there are ways to work with the authorities without compromising your users’ privacy, and there was no good reason for Durov to fully ignore the existence of laws and regulations. By failing to realise that, he may very well have made things worse for everyone who cares about online security, privacy, and the right for encryption.