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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I won’t go into the specific channels as to not promote them or what they do but we can talk about one known example, which is how Bellingcat got to the FSB officers responsible for the poisoning of Navalny via their mobile phone call logs and airline ticket data. They used the two highly popular bots called H****a and the E** ** G**, which allow to get everything known to the government and other social networks on every citizen of Russia for about $1 to $5. They use the Telegram API and have been there for years. How do you moderate that? You don’t. You take it down as the illegal, privacy-violating, and doxing-enabling content that it is.
Edit: “Censored” the names of the bots, as I still don’t want to make them even easier to find.
Was that a bad thing? I’ve never heard the name Bellingcat before, but it sounds like this would’ve been partially responsible for the reporting about the Navalny poisoning?
Ultimately, that sounds like an issue the Russian government needs to fix. Telegram bots are also trivial to launch and duplicate so … actually detecting and shutting that down without it being a massive expensive money pit is difficult.
It’s easy to say “oh they’re hosting it, they should just take it down.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/16/postal-service-preferred-shipper-drug-dealers/
Should the US federal government hold themselves liable for delivering illegal drugs via their own postal service? I mean there’s serious nuance in what’s reasonable liability for a carrier … and personally holding the CEO criminally liable is a pretty extreme instance of that.