Telegram founder's arrest is radical — if it's a crime to build privacy tools, there will be no privacy
www.crikey.com.auPavel Durov’s arrest suggests that the law enforcement dragnet is being widened from private financial transactions to private speech.
The arrest of the Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France this week is extremely significant. It confirms that we are deep into the second crypto war, where governments are systematically seeking to prosecute developers of digital encryption tools because encryption frustrates state surveillance and control. While the first crypto war in the 1990s was led by the United States, this one is led jointly by the European Union — now its own regulatory superpower.
Durov, a former Russian, now French citizen, was arrested in Paris on Saturday, and has now been indicted. You can read the French accusations here. They include complicity in drug possession and sale, fraud, child pornography and money laundering. These are extremely serious crimes — but note that the charge is complicity, not participation. The meaning of that word “complicity” seems to be revealed by the last three charges: Telegram has been providing users a “cryptology tool” unauthorised by French regulators.
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Why do they have the data in the first place?
Your communications on telegram are not encrypted by default. You can have e2e encrypted 1on1-conversations, but group chats are blown for them to do everything.
They had a hilarious argumentation where they claimed that the key to unlock your chats is stored on a different server than your chats are and therefore they cannot access it. A company that argues like they (“trust us”) isn’t trustworthy.
Signal has been audited over and over again by internationally respected cryptographers. They cannot decrypt your chats by design. No need for “trust us bro”.
Yeah this is true and I don’t recommended Telegram in any case, but it’s sad that a guy who try to protect a bit our privacy be arrested