Pavel 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.
If Telegram wasn’t good for privacy, Western governments would not be trying to shut it down.
E2EE is nice, but doesn’t matter if the government can just sieze or hack your phone. Much better to use non-Western social media and messaging apps.
This is a very bad faith argument. It relies on assuming that “western government bad” without any basis of statement as to WHY youre claiming this. Would you say Twitter is good for privacy too then? It fits the same argument. The western governments are currently Trying to shut it down, the EU has threatened to shut off access completely. Is Twitter good for privacy because the western governments are trying to shut it down? No. Twitter is absolutely awful for privacy. On the same card, so is telegram. Telegram can not be publically audited. Their backend is closed source. You dont know what theyre doing with your data. For all you know, they took your phone number and sold it to a bail bondsman for when they see you talking about doing crimes on their platform. They could’ve sold any data you gave to them to anyone and you wouldnt be able to prove it because theres no way for you to personally audit them. You know what you can audit? Signal, XMPP, Matrix, fuck you could even audit OpenPGP over email. The argument you put fourth is completely bad faith and is full of holes.
Dis you miss the entire Snowden revelations? Western governments are hostile to online privacy and freedom.
They are not trying shutdown Telegram, they are trying to control it.
What kind of argument is this supposed to be? Governments can size your phone anywhere … oh wait … lemmy.ml … yeah, I see…
The fuck does that even mean?
Literal brainlet behavior. “I am the chad and you are the little virgin soyjack and little virgin soyjack is on lemmy.ml”
In case you are serious: Lemmy.ml is known for being a tankie instance. So a nonsensical anti-west statement makes a lot more sense considering the instance the user chose.
They like to poke fun at the “west” but Russia, China and others are all worse some how. At least in most countries it is controversial to attack journalists and encryption
If it would be a good tool for privacy, Russia would try to shut it down the same way they did with Signal.
Russia tried for years to ban Telegram. They stopped after Telegram managed to keep itself alive by proxies.
they did ban it, and everyone still used it (Telegram was good at evading the bans back then, but eventually Roskomnadzor became decent at banning it), and then they unbanned it, whatever that means