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Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Dotcom got extradited (which was declared legal much later). Durov landed in a country that had an arrest warrant out for him.

I hope his situation isn't similar to Dotcom's, as Dotcom was shown to be complicit in the crimes he was being persecuted for. Convicting the megaupload people would've been a LOT harder if they hadn't been uploading and curating illegal content on their platform themselves.

As a service provider, you're not responsible for what your users post as long as you take appropriate action after being informed of illegal content. That's where they're trying to get Telegram, because Telegram is known to ignore law enforcement as much as possible (to the point of doing so illegally and getting fined for it).

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https://restoreprivacy.com/telegram-sharing-user-data/

> the operators of the messenger app Telegram have released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in several cases. According to SPIEGEL information, this was data from suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it is still difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.

https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/chat-apps-government-ties-a...

> two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”

Signal built by the US government? Is there any more actual information on this claim?

Signal's early funding source is public record, https://www.opentech.fund/projects-we-support/supported-proj...

Double Ratchet [1] is also used by WhatsApp (2B+ users) and IETF MLS [2] standard for E2EE group messaging.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm

[2] https://www.ietf.org/blog/mls-secure-and-usable-end-to-end-e...

I don't understand.

Nothing in this comment is about the US government funding Signal's encryption.

   Click link -> About -> About our funding

The US government likes funding encrypted communication channels because it helps destabilize the kinds of dictators that eavesdrop on dissidents.

and it's useful for tradecraft. I think NSA uses Tor to some degree, for example.

I suspect most Tor exit nodes are controlled by the US government and/or its allied governments. It doesn't make much sense for anybody else to run an exit node because your IP gets banned by much of the internet and you get unwanted visits from law enforcement.

"What kinds of people operate tor exit nodes and why do they do it" is one of those questions that I know I'm not even supposed to admit being curious about, let alone ask, in the company of people who are most capable of accurately answering.

I operate one. The sole aim is to enable the Tor network to exist. I believe in the principle of private communication.

Tor was invented within the US military and was sponsored by the state department.

funded != built ?

> Durov landed in a country that had an arrest warrant out for him.

And of which he’s a citizen, fwiw

From my understanding the arrest warrant only was created while he was en route; sneaky sneaky..

That’s really dark and dystopian

really? we seal warrants in the US all the time - we don't want people who we are trying to apprehend to always know ahead of time we are trying to apprehend them

I found this airplane trickery amusing.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/son-el-chapo-another-si...

The US is on it’s way to becoming a dystopia so not the best argument…

maybe, but i don't think sealed warrants are the reason

There purpose is to hide charges as longas possible to deceive or trick which is against a fully transparent process

There are valid reasons, like stopping people from destroying evidence or fleeing.

There are also valid reasons the other way, like consulting an attorney to challenge the warrant or prepare a defense before it gets executed, disrupts your life and prevents you from clearing your name because you're being incarcerated without bail. It's hard to investigate the charges against you from a cell.

Or the ability of journalists to inform the public of what the government is getting on with in their name. If the government is investigating their critics they have no right to keep it a secret.

You're somewhat mistaken. In the U.S., you aren't owed a warning that the cops are looking for you, especially if you're a flight risk. That was never part of it.

That inconvenient bill of rights keeps us a step or two behind the rest of the anglosphere in decent to tyranny, but only for so long. It just takes a handful of dishonest judges to claim some right actually means something entirely different.

It has already been a form of one for at least 10 years, just happening too gradually for the average person to realize it.

That's the beauty of comments like yours.

Because in your eyes it is so gradual the difference between it's happening slowly and not happening at all is imperceptible and impossible to prove.

> Because in your eyes it is so gradual the difference between it's happening slowly and not happening at all is imperceptible and impossible to prove.

It's extremely straightforward to prove. You look at the laws that have been passed and the court opinions issued in the last 30-60 years.

your understanding is based on what? i would assume this is just standard unsealed warrant like they have in the US

I found this article that explains that the arrest warrant was only to be activated if Pavel was on the French territory.

(French) https://www.sudouest.fr/economie/reseaux-sociaux/le-patron-d...

It could have been a warrant that was not communicated to Durov himself. This would have helped to catch him by surprise.

yeah so sounds like (what in the US we call) a sealed warrant, not that it was literally issued while he was in the air

The Sud-Ouest article must have been updated because the version currently online does not mention that at all. Quite the opposite, the article quotes an official that was surprised that Durov would come to Paris anyway even though he knew he was under an arrest warrant in France, and another source says that he might have decided to come in France anyway because he believed he'll never be held accountable.

According to the more detailed news sources I can find about this, it seems he knew the French were looking for him. I don't know if he knew about the contents of the warrant, but it does seem he knew the authorities were planning to arrest him.

From what I can tell the warrant has been out for longer, but he was arrested when the airport police noticed his name was on a list. There's not a lot of information out there, with neither the French authorities nor Telegram providing any official statements to the media.

Fuck around and find out. If he legitimately ignored legal French documents forcing him to share information, as the French have declared, he's got got.

You don't step foot on a country with an extradition treaty, even less so the country itself, where you're flouting their warrants for your company's data.

so which country doesnt dubai and uae extradite to?

Despite having lots of treaties agreeing to extradition in principle, the UAE is somewhat notorious for never extraditing anybody anywhere in practice.

https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/a-golden-opportunity-f...

Wrong.

https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/-i-m-not-leaving---kim-do...

1) There was an order signed recently. He has not physically left NZ yet. 2) He's not convicted, he hasn't been in front of a judge for the charges against him

> Convicting the megaupload people would've been a LOT harder if they hadn't been uploading and curating illegal content on their platform themselves.

This is just a gimmick to bamboozle judges and the public. The ploy is to claim that someone is guilty of serious offense A because you proved they committed less serious offense B, even though the offenses have different elements and penalties.

They use the ploy because any large organization by definition has a lot of people in it and copyright infringement is pretty common, so by the law of large numbers somebody in the company is probably doing it even if the company doesn't want them to and then the prosecutors want to claim that the company as a whole is doing something wrong and has to be shut down. Which doesn't make any sense when another company is just going to provide the same perfectly legal service and the users are going to use it for the exact same thing.

Moreover, the obvious way for companies to prevent this -- indeed, the thing Megaupload's replacement started doing after the original was shut down -- is to encrypt everything so their employees have no access to it. Which I have no objection to, but if courts and prosecutors like to be able to issue a subpoena and actually get something back, they might want to reconsider turning the ability of a company to access data into a liability.

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