Pavel Durov is questioned on 12 charges [pdf]
tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr
tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr
- Complicity - Administration of an online platform to allow an illegal transaction in an organised band,
- Refusal to communicate, at the request of the authorised authorities, the information or documents necessary for the realisation and exploitation of interceptions authorised by law,
- Complicity - Detention of the image of a minor of a child-pornographic nature,
- Complicity - Dissemination, offer or making available in an organised tape of images of a minor of a pornographic nature,
- Complicity - Acquisition, transport, holding, offer or disposal of narcotic products,
- Complicity - Offer, assignment or making available without legitimate reason of equipment, an instrument, a program or data designed or adapted for the attack and access to the operation of an automated data processing system,
- Complicity - Organised gang scam,
- Association of criminals with a view to committing a crime or offence punishable by 5 years of imprisonment at least,
- Money laundering of crimes or offences in organised gangs,
- Provision of cryptology services to ensure confidentiality functions without a declaration of conformity,
- Provision of a cryptological means not exclusively ensuring authentication or integrity control functions without prior declaration,
- Import of a cryptology means that does not exclusively perform authentication or integrity control functions without prior declaration.
> - Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration,
> - Providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration,
> - Importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.
What does "without certified declaration" mean?
The others are pretty non-surprising, if the comms were unencrypted and the company refused to cooperate.
But how this gets interesting is if Telegram has no explicit office presence in France and the app and webapp are merely distributed to French users resulting in these charges.
If I have a web server in the US that serves content that uses a cryptography JS library and a French user accesses it could I be arrested in France because I didn't declare the library to the French bureaucracy and get it approved?
Has France basically just nuked themselves for non-France based cryptography providers? Is npm going to block France in case a French citizen imports a JS cryptography library? Are a bunch of apps going to get their app removed from app stores for France?
Evidently this all seems incredibly selective and arbitrary but the lawyers are going to have to assess the risks of the French now in a way they didn't before, and once again another unclear rule haunts the EU software industry.
The system is f*d up.
I’m sure that the intent is at least somewhat cynical in some (many? Most?) cases, but this serves a legitimate purpose.
Most will get a mass market exemption under 5D992, but a surprising number of modern applications making 'interesting' uses of crypto will need export licenses.
https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/encryption-and-export-admi...
…says the "PHP developer from Russia," according to his biography.
Basically, do you know the saying 'never roll your own crypto'? It's a bureaucratization of this saying (to avoid people getting sold insecure crypto). Agree or not on the idea that the government should control that (I'm torn tbh), but it isn't a way to force people into illegality to pressure them.
It's also fascinating that they also seem to be nailing him for failing to disclose the limitations of Telegram's cryptography.
"failing to perform even basic content enforcement on public channels, with instances of known CSAM being detected and reported by our ingest systems".
> For two persons to be complicit in a crime that does not involve negligence, they must share the same criminal intent; "there must be a community of purpose, partnership in the unlawful undertaking".
Yikes. He's done. If you administer a message board (whether in open-web, dark web or an app) and your board gets overrun with CSAM and you don't take down CSAM after being reported repeatedly, you're going to go to jail. Simple as that.
“Pavel DUROV, founder and CEO of instant messaging and platform TELEGRAM, was arrested at Le Bourget airport in the outskirts of Paris on Saturday, the 24th of August 2024, then taken into police custody at 8 p.m.
This measure comes in the context of a judicial investigation opened the 8th of July 2024, following a preliminary inquiry initiated by Section J3 - JUNALCO (Fight against Cybercrime) of the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office.
This judicial investigation was opened against person unnamed, on charges of:
- Complicity – web-mastering an online platform in order to enable an illegal transaction in organized group,
- Refusal to communicate, at the request of competent authorities, information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law,
- Complicity – possessing pornographic images of minors,
- Complicity - distributing, offering or making available pornographic images of minors, in organized group,
- Complicity - acquiring, transporting, possessing, offering or selling narcotic substances,
- Complicity - offering, selling or making available, without legitimate reason, equipment, tools, programs or data designed for or adapted to get access to and to damage the operation of an automated data processing system,
- Complicity – organized fraud,
- Criminal association with a view to committing a crime or an offense punishable by 5 or more years of imprisonment,
- Laundering of the proceeds derived from organized group’s offences and crimes,
- Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration,
- Providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration,
- Importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.
The investigative magistrates in charge of this preliminary judicial investigation have requested a co-referral of the Centre for the Fight against Cybercrime (Centre de lutte contre les criminalités numériques, C3N) and the Anti-Fraud National Office (Office National Anti-Fraude, ONAF) for the pursuance of the investigations.
It is within this procedural framework in which Pavel DUROV was questioned by the investigators.
The custody period was extended until the 25th August 2024 by an investigative magistrate and can last up to 96 hours (that being the 28th August 2024) given the applicable procedure for organized crime offences, as referred to above.”
The court press release pag 3 and 4 are in English....
It's on page 3 in English.
In other words, Signal is in the clear, because it's E2EE for all purposes and the operators wouldn't have the ability (via reasonable means) to access the data in the first place?
Meaning, Signal is "in the clear" right now, because nobody fucking cares. It might not be, should the owner change, or should it became more popular (either in general or among certain categories of people).
This goes straight to the point about this being more about politics.
The difference here is that when other platforms are informed about child porn they do something about removing it.
Nothing to do with politics at all, just a weird fantasy you’re choosing to believe for who knows what reason.
Sure but telegram isn’t really just a “messaging app”. It has features that support broad social networking. Some of those features just don’t scale effectively if they’re E2EE.
I think the real takeaway is all social networking applications must have active content moderation.
The French term they're using is "Garde à vue" which is more like "under custody" instead of "in jail"
The last paragraph gives some more info
> The custody period was extended until the 25th August 2024 by an investigative magistrate and can last up to 96 hours (that being the 28th August 2024) given the applicable procedure for organized crime offences, as referred to above
(I don't think the translation is the best one but it works)
> - Provision of cryptology services to ensure confidentiality functions without a declaration of conformity,
Does signal declare conformity of its privacy crypto functions? (with what, anyway?)
https://www.at-ica.com/encryption-in-france/
Anyway, with Telegram, what is the outher country? What is "import"? Someone using Telegram servers from France? Taking money from customers in France, for provison of service hosted potentially elsewhere? Someone in France being able to download Telegram client?
- the indictment is valid only on the territory of France
- Durov, although he knew, flies straight to Paris from Azerbaidjan
- Durov was in Azerbaidjan at the same time as Putin
https://www.scmagazine.com/brief/un-overwhelmingly-approves-...
They get really upset when you also stonewall them
Tornado cash devs were an example.
Satoshi Nakamoto decision to remain anonymous and disappear seems wiser as time passes.
I have seen people comparing durov with ross ulbricht which is mind boggling.
This man created a messaging/social media app that is not controlled by the powers that be and now he is getting punished for his freedom and independence.
Don’t let yourself be fooled.
Remember, innocent until proven guilty.
They are coming for us next.
That's the problem with this "lowly devs engaging in biz that big finance guys without paying their dues to the rest of the extortion racket". Which HSBC executives got jailed for laundering billions for narcos during the GFC? Oh it was just a slap in the wrist fine.
https://therecord.media/tornado-cash-money-laundering-verdic...
The big trial is still in progress so it remains to be seen how those charges will ultimately be resolved:
https://www.coindesk.com/arc/outboundfeeds/yahoo/nrys8o/?out...
If police asks you to add a backdoor in your software though. As far as I know you are only explicitly obliged to do so in Australia.
He got done on child porn charges amongst other things. Nobody is coming for your GitHub account
Now he has been arrested in France for refusing to censor and share private info on his users with Western governments.
Say what you want be he does stick to his principles.
is that why there are tons of examples of russian dissidents being DOXXED on telegram? and non russia aligned OSINT accounts regularly deleted with no reason given?
Wow, so me and everyone who has entered France with a laptop or phone in the last 15 years has been guilty of this "crime"?
Now that I know, I'm actually surprised that Telegram would not have filed that form given its size. How could they have gotten it through Apple's review without doing it?