Recently have been a bunch of scandals where french intelligence officers where involved in murder plots.
- There is "Haurus", a french intelligence officer who sold personal information on the darknet, in one case he sold personal information including the address of a drug dealer. Something that is believed to have helped in his murdered by a "competitor".
- There is the murder of racing driver "Laurent Pasquali" who is presumed to have been killed by a french intelligence officer. The plot involved over 20 people with several of them being french intelligence officers. In fact they got his personal information and address to plan the murder plot through the french intelligence database.
You can Google all this, it is true.
The European Union has been angling for more comprehensive access to messaging platforms with proposal after proposal.
Everyone here loves to sing the praises of the EU but broad regulatory powers is not a clear cut value proposition: European governments and those governed have a long history of oppression.
What's more, many of the broad regulatory powers have been used successfully by despotic regimes like China as cudgels not only to break apart monopolies (good) but to demand unfettered access to data (bad).
These accusations made by the French government of conspiracy on one individual and alleged invitations by a head of state to entrap should be chilling to anyone observing. It reminds me of what happened to Jack Ma, when Ant threatened the CPC's interests.
If Telegram really was not answering enforcement requests in a timely manner, then France should have moved against the company either through a direct ban on the app itself or other court action. Putting its CEO in prison sends a message. That message should be terrifying to anyone who values a free society.
If you ignore the missing human rights activists were using telegram and then suddenly disappeared.
as pointed out before, telegram is utterly compromised security wise. Its really advantageous that "naughty people" are documenting their stuff there as it leaves a loverly indelible trail of actions.
What human rights activists? What kind of gaslighting is that?
What are your sources on "utterly compromised security on telegram"?
It would be a huge stretch of imagination to say Telegram is savings lives.
The guy who is presumed to be the murderer is an ex-intelligence officer, not currently employed by the intelligence services.
> It is even possible that Durov has saved lives by not communicating user information to the french intelligence services.
And exactly how many did he condemned by letting criminal network run wild on his platform, with little to no moderation, and no collaboration with police forces ?
There's a "he resigned two weeks ago" meme in Russia. Every time a police officer or someone else from the government is caught red-handed committing a crime, it "turns out" they have allegedly resigned a few weeks prior to the incident. It seems Putin's regime is not an aberration, they're trailblazers.
The main takeaway here is that Durov is not being arrested strictly because his platform contains illegal material. He is being arrested because (allegedly)
- he is aware of the illegal material, and - he refuses to cooperate with law enforcement to remove that material.
So the French authorities are charging him with being complicit in a lot of this stuff.
Platforms like Signal can get away with this because they are properly E2E encrypted, and cannot identify illegal content. Telegram, on the other hand, has decryption keys for the messages and media sent in group chats, meaning they can identify and remove illegal content if they choose to.
I feel like I must emphasize this because it's repeatedly missed. Telegram has mainly 3 different components. The first is a server-side encrypted messaging platform, which is unremarkable, and as-secure as Discord or Slack. The second is its "E2EE" system, secret chats, which don't sync, and have not been broken (though people have raised some concerns historically about it). The third system is channels, which are basically subscription feeds from users. Channels are as secure as Slack or Discord or Twitter or Facebook. The whole point of Channels is that you can subscribe to channels and get messages in Telegram from them, but they're basically open access. A good example is Durov's channel: https://t.me/s/durov
Now I say all of this because the vast majority of people believe that E2EE would solve the problem here. The reality is that channels doesn't make sense to be E2EE since anyone can join, and channels are where are a large amount of the "interesting" content to law enforcement occurs. Abuse definitely occurs to some degree on all 3 components, but channels simply don't exist in Signal, as an example.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat...
(The downside of course is that it's then also open to «bad actors».)
Signal isn't magically protected by proper E2E encryption. When the time comes to take them down legally, all that's needed is evidence from end users phones demonstrating illegal activities occurring over Signal. But - for now - Signal seems to have better friends and or be upsetting less authorities than Telegram.
To me it's pretty clear reason why they've gone after Telegram is the Channels and Groups. Seen from a certain perspective Telegram channels are an alternative to Reddit, and have been popular medium during COVID and the Ukraine war for "alternative news". By now Reddit is properly controlled and subdued but Telegram isn't.
No, that's non sense. It is perfectly legal to operate a E2E encrypted platform in the EU.
What would be illegal is for Signal to refuse to answer when asked for information by the justice system. As long as they are cooperative and provide what they can - even if it's not much - everything is alright.
This is full on speculation. Right now the reality is you can buy underage people, drugs and weapons on telegram. ISIS recruitment channels, etc.
Playing the "free speech" card is disingenuous.
This is a very slippery slope.
I don't see a problem with requiring a company to cooperate with a court order to release data. However if a company does not have this data (because it's encrypted) it should not be liable or be required to collect such data.
ISPs hand over phone records and anything else they have on people. They set wiretaps, they can triangulate users, you name it. When the government asks Telegram for information, they get a history dump. When they ask a carrier for information, they get a history dump (for anything stored on ISP servers, such as email or some text messages, depending on the warrant) _and a live copy of every bit of information that flows over the connection_.
Email inboxes get handed over all the time, and server hosts must take down content within days to hours depending on how illegal the content reported is. Services like Google have been handing out information like "what users were in this general area at this time" because they track that stuff (which is why Android's location history has degraded significantly; Google moved that stuff to on-device storage for this reason).
As for data collection: in some places, the government can force you to collect data. Some "logless" VPN/email providers have been compelled to turn on logging for certain accounts, for instance.
The alternative, which was almost a thing in the early internet, was that ISPs were responsible for all content on their systems.
The whole issue is that they don't. Telegram doesn't provide information when asked to by law inforcement. That's literally the reason Durov is being charged.
Very far. but france is a civil law system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_responsibility_in_Fre...)
if you don't comply with legally valid requests, then you are going to be held liable for it.
But thats the same in common law as well. If an hosting provider in the USA refuses to act on reports of hosting copyrighted material, then they are liable for damages. Safe Harbour has its limits.
That's why we don't have network operators for criminals. We have seen the demand for it in the crypto(as in cryptocurrency) space and many went to prison for running networks and tools for criminals, especially people running cryptocurrency tumblers were caught, prosecuted and imprisoned.
I don't believe in a CEO that takes on the law enforcement for higher morals or even money, that's mafia's line of work. In some cases maybe its possible to have high moral outlaws but they will have to shoot at the police when they are coming to make an arrest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41390173
(Algorithmic feeds are very popular amongst platforms, not sure that Telegram does that too though ?)
> This is a very slippery slope.
I wonder what is hard to understand. Is there CP/violent content in Instagram? Nope. In Facebook? Nope. In YouTube? nope.
Why? These companies are held responsible for the public content, published in clear, on their platforms and they enforce moderation to remove illegal content.
Telegram is in clear and has public content violating the law. They should have done the same, they did not.
And then there's likely a real CP sharing groups on some of those platforms: algorithms work as invisible cloak for those groups, and we in the public without that preference won't have idea until police discovers one through a confiscated phone.
The fact that you can't understand the difference between facebook/youtube and an ISP.
An ISP would have to vet every site they open up to their users. Which would effectively incentivize an AOL like internet with just 5-10 websites.
Yes. Infact you can find public groups, pages and channels posting all kind of illegal stuff (drugs, weapons, fraud, dox..)
Yes there is... and a lot of it.
Facebook is especially bad at moderation.
If you host illegal content from your home network, the police alert your ISP, and the ISP did nothing, you can be sure the police will arrest them too.
They are already liable unless they follow the law to enjoy certain exemptions.
er...did you miss the last twenty years?
the US government destroyed a website for prostitution ads: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/backpage-principals-convicted...
the US government has destroyed every darknet market they could find, despite most of them not selling any drugs themselves.
CSAM is taken extremely seriously and any web site that hosts it will be pursued to the end of the earth.
etc.
this is not a new thing at all.
> However if a company does not have this data (because it's encrypted) it should not be liable or be required to collect such data.
Telegram deliberately and suspiciously encrypts approximately nothing in a way that helps anyone, so this is completely irrelevant.
I found it a little low on detail, though.
https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...
It's a laundry list of accessory to commit crimes + a few interesting associated ones like organising to commit crimes, and laundering the proceeds of crimes.
I wonder about this: «Fourniture d'un moyen de cryptologie n'assurant pas exclusivement des fonctions d'authentification ou de contrôle d'intégrité sans déclaration préalable,» Do you happen to know what making that declaration involves?
That's not little low on details.
Has played a role, sure, enough to talk about it in public, but I expected to see what the prosecutor thought would be enough for a court.
Telegram has legal obligations and we all know they haven't fulfilled them-you can easily verify that on your own: you don't need to be a government agency to do that - open telegram and use the search function, hell even the auto suggestions lead you to a ton of illegal stuff.
- Durov is, according to him, living in exile outside of Russia since 2014 - due to Russian gov persecution.
- Since his "exile" - he has travelled 50-60 times to Russia https://www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/1f2pgg3/pavel_dur...
- Most Russian billionaires that live in exile and are persecuted by the RU gov fall from windows (or something tall) quite often. Durov has been living lavishly though.
- Russia is trying to protect him now that he is being charged.
i.e. a lot of odd and contradicting moments.
Telegram was also blocked in Russia for a period of time while they argued about compliance [1].
I think it is far more likely that Russia understands that Durov is one of the most influential people that acts as an emissary to their country. His past altercations around VK and subsequent compliance with various investigations in Russia probably mean they have at least a semi-amicable relationship now. The reality is that, for better or for worse, Telegram is widely used by a large number of people. In just the same way that US agencies can compel investigations with US companies, I'm sure that Russia exerts some amount of control on Telegram for investigation purposes. But this is what I would expect about any messaging platform that isn't fully E2EE.
The fact of the matter is that Telegram's flagship product for many people is NOT the messaging system, it's the non-encrypted channels system, which has been used widely by various people to act as a social network. This system is valuable to investigate for a lot of people. Encrypted messaging aside, companies usually are compelled to do a minimum amount of compliance work with authorities for jurisdictions they operate in.
[1]: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/whats-...
Not in the same way, since Telegram (unlike, say, vKontakte), is NOT a Russian company.
(At least officially, also quite anti-Putin at its funding... less clearly now.)
That "fact" is disputed. The source of that information appears to have relied on unverified information, among other issues.
I do find it odd that Russia is working so hard to get him out of France, though.
We're simply led to believe that Telegram (a 950M user base) is developed by a Pavel, his brother, and their "friends" in Dubai. There's no evidence of any physical office in Dubai, too.
In short, there's very little evidence to corroborate their story.
Isn't the whole narrative that Durov, who is essentially extremely rich as a result of building VK, bankrolled the whole creation? For all of the criticism, Telegram remains one of the most highly polished and well-designed apps I've ever used. It doesn't get bogged down with lots of messages, and has regular feature-rich updates. It seems to me like Telegram has one of the best development teams on the planet in terms of sheer output. Maybe they don't need to compete on talent simply because they're paid well by Durov?
Le Monde couldn't figure out why he gotten that citizenship, there is very little detail.
>Durov was naturalized as a French citizen in August 2021, giving him European Union citizenship. Le Monde described the naturalisation as "mysterious", since Durov had not resided in France apart from brief visits. Le Monde suggested that Durov was naturalised via the rarely used "merit foreigner" procedure that is awarded directly by the French government to people viewed to have contributed exceptionally to France's international influence or international economic relations.
In other words don't be too quick in condemning channels which allow voices outside the desired narrative to be heard because the day might come than you need to step outside it. Given that you seem to recognise 'disinfo' - given your claim of Telegram being the main source of it - you can just ignore it just like others ignore what they consider or know to be falsehoods.
Telegram is used by Russia, terror groups, and so on.
It's always funny to hear people talk about free speech in that situation.
As well as a lot of people in CIS countries (including Ukraine), people fed up with Meta and probably 95% of Android custom ROM communities (wild guess, do not quote me on that).
Not to mention platforms like, for example, Discord. Also used in Russia. Also probably used by terror groups. But it's okay because we are supposed to like "our" platform.
>It's always funny to hear people talk about free speech in that situation.
Also one big difference might be that Discord is part of the Deep Web (requiring an account and an invitation to its chatrooms to even see what is going on there), while Telegram seems to be mostly on the Open Web, even providing an interface to be crawled ?
Didn’t we have months and months of this discussion around the last US presidential election? Haven’t we had this discussion years ago when piracy was rampant on ”surface web” sites?
Businesses have always had legal requirements based on the nature of their trade.
What France is doing is unjust. They should stop. If their laws are not just they should be repealed.
Edit: the argument about Durov not ”trying to do anything” after the French requests don't seem that relevant as it aligns with “I tried” excuse of a poor student’s missing homework, i.e. trying isn’t enough - crimes are either stopped or they aren’t.
Edit2: ha @ downvotes w/o any opinions.
What a superficial take. Following the same logic, highway management would be held accountable if a killer used one of their roads to go and commit a crime.
But for platform providers, they (the providers) have the responsibility to moderate the content that is hosted publicly on their platforms. Which most of the content on Telegram is. And if some illegal material is there, they (the providers) have the responsibility to take it offline.
Do you have any idea how much, let's say Meta, spends in terms of money and manpower to prevent this? How much moderation goes on for most of the platforms? Read about regulations in France (SREN law IIRC).
"Telegram has played a role in multiple criminal cases in France tied to child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and online hate crimes, but has shown a “near-total absence” of response to requests for cooperation from law enforcement, Ms. Beccuau said."
That's a very bad take. The charges are because of Telegram repeatedly refusing or being too slow to take down illegal content (illegal in France, that is): child pornography, drugs ads, etc. Meta and X both remove illegal content when a notice from authorities is made, unlike Telegram which drags its feet.
If Telegram was encrypted e2e, Durov would not have been able to know of the existence of that illegal content, and could have plausible deniability. As it stands though, Telegram was notified of publicly available illegal content, and refused to remove it, which is a crime in France, where Durov is a citizen.
Why is this important? Do you think he would not have been arrested if he had not had a French passport? I would think that all that matters is that his crimes fall under French jurisdiction.
They all cooperate with governments: https://www.engadget.com/authorities-reportedly-ordered-goog...
In fact, google is partly CIA/NSA
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
Or that the charges are false?
Or that the charges are true but only enforced because they want him for other reasons?
Go and look at "Safe Harbour" rules. Its not a blank cheque to say "oh it wasn't us, it was the users". your protection from being sanctioned is contingent on complying with requests to take down posts(be that copyright or other).
The same thing applies here
