Originally published at: Telegram CEO arrested in France - Boing Boing
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Which is a bigger scandal than people doing illegal stuff with it: people are in prison for saying mean things about the Russian government on Telegram.
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Do Elno next!
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Not Russian or Chinese.
American tech oligarchs can break all the laws they want.
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Let us see if Musk goes to Russia…
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Telegram, being a product of the creator of VK, was pre-enshttified. I never understood why it had a reputation amongst various shady types (fascists, white supremacists, scammers, paedophiles, etc.) for being totally secure to the point where they could talk freely. I’ll bet quite a few of them are sweating after seeing this news.
[* ETA: I’m aware that Durov reportedly refused to give the Putin regime access to VK user data, but that it was known as Russia’s version of Facebook says it all about that platform.]
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I think they mixed up “no moderation” with “secure privacy”.
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Russia war bloggers are worried because Russian soldiers rely on Telegram to communicate in the field.
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I’ve heard speculation that Durov went to France because he’d learned he had an appointment with a high window and decided he’d be better off in a nice safe French jail than in Putin’s hands…
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I think it’s that certain types of speech were protected on it, others weren’t. It has long been claimed that people are in jail for saying non-approved by Putin things in group chats on it. Group chats are never encrypted in Telegram. P2P can be but aren’t by default (or so I’m told, I’ve never touched it with anything).
I don’t know how much access US law enforcement has on their servers. Obviously Russians have access and can imprison dissidents but it seems to be more of a problem for the west to do so.
We can then move this to the spies lies and realpolitik thread if we get into a discussion of just how much arms/drugs/child sex abuse is official and tolerated on the western oligarch social media….
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Whatever the answer, that “has” is about to become a “had”, as a desperate Durov cuts a deal with a Nine Eyes country.
I agree that a “what about the crappy behaviour of Western social media platforms” discussion is best left to another Topic, where there will no doubt be much to talk about. This one is about Durov and crappy Russian social media platforms.
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Not quite, in the EU, for now. It’s just that EU rules target the corporate body more than the controlling minds.
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It’s freaking crazy how Russians are using that and cell phones which give away positions. They are such a clown show, and the only reason they are still fighting is their large population and lots of obsolete but mostly functional arms. Still, Christ. What a bloodbath over there. All for the hubris of one man.
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It’s a helluva drug, hubris is.
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Some writing on Telegram and privacy and security (surprise surprise, Modi’s thugs have publicly had information handed over to them). This writer claims the end to end is rarely used (it is only one to one chats and manually enabled each time). He also claims that there is always unencrypted header data that Russia has used. And that the whole implementation of encryption is fishy.
As I said, I’m a total outsider on this. I’ve never touched the thing. Not even to see what dreadful people were up to.
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Given that it was apparently the only place where the warrant was valid (not the rest of Europe), it seems less like a mistake and more deliberate - unless he thought he was safe because he wasn’t stopping there?
I’ve been seeing so many claims to the contrary today - that Russia’s frequent prosecution of Telegram users there, over critical remarks they made about the government on the platform, indicates he was handing over access. I’m even seeing claims he was an FSB agent himself. I don’t know if this is just internet FUD talking, or there’s any basis for it…
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A piece from 2022 linked from there:
And a user comment about Telegram’s role in Russia and relationship with the authorities:
There is a sea of obfuscation and disinformation and confusion around this topic, but the fact that Telegram isn’t banned like every other independent media, enterprise, or person in Russia, and not jailed or declared a “foreign agent” or killed lets you know that the Kremlin and Russian intelligence find it useful. They find it handy not just to spy on everyone, but even to talk to themselves, as their own communications and feedback systems are very shattered now and have always been riddled with compromise. Telegram serves the role of Blue TASS in the Soviet era, the channel where the real news is really posted, available only to elites, so they can know what’s going on even in their own propagandized space.
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this guy seems to be a serial collector of citizenships as well
- Russia from birth)
- Saint Kitts and Nevis (from 2013)
- United Arab Emirates (from 2021)
- France (from 2021)
He seems to have got his French Citizenship under slightly dubious conditions (a bit like Peter Thiel and NZ) - I wonder if he thought that would protect him.
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