Telegram founder charged with wide range of crimes in France
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Recently have been a bunch of scandals where french intelligence officers where involved in murder plots.
- There is "Haurus", a french intelligence officer who sold personal information on the darknet, in one case he sold personal information including the address of a drug dealer. Something that is believed to have helped in his murdered by a "competitor".
- There is the murder of racing driver "Laurent Pasquali" who is presumed to have been killed by a french intelligence officer. The plot involved over 20 people with several of them being french intelligence officers. In fact they got his personal information and address to plan the murder plot through the french intelligence database.
You can Google all this, it is true.
It's satirical in the sense that it takes a mocking tone. It doesn't do parody.
For instance, this one is obviously a parody :
https://francois-pelletant.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/0...
The European Union has been angling for more comprehensive access to messaging platforms with proposal after proposal.
Everyone here loves to sing the praises of the EU but broad regulatory powers is not a clear cut value proposition: European governments and those governed have a long history of oppression.
What's more, many of the broad regulatory powers have been used successfully by despotic regimes like China as cudgels not only to break apart monopolies (good) but to demand unfettered access to data (bad).
These accusations made by the French government of conspiracy on one individual and alleged invitations by a head of state to entrap should be chilling to anyone observing. It reminds me of what happened to Jack Ma, when Ant threatened the CPC's interests.
If Telegram really was not answering enforcement requests in a timely manner, then France should have moved against the company either through a direct ban on the app itself or other court action. Putting its CEO in prison sends a message. That message should be terrifying to anyone who values a free society.
I find it deeply uncomfortable that the HN contingent is rushing to defend Telegram like if it was an open attack of free speach and not justified by Telegram completes lack of cooperation in crime investigations.
>If Telegram really was not answering enforcement requests in a timely manner, then France should have moved against the company either through a direct ban on the app itself or other court action. Putting its CEO in prison sends a message.
Yes, it sends the message that executives are actually responsible for what their company does. That's a good message.
Acting opportunistically without warning and or out of vengefulness or malice brings Justice into ill-repute.
Like entrapment, this is action is about as low and debased as it gets.
The French Government could have banned Telegram across French territories, not only has it not done that but French leaders actually use the program. Such hypocrisy is mind-blowing.
Whatever happened to Liberté, égalité, fraternité?
Rules are and were always very clear. That's called the law. I don't understand why people here are acting like if there somehow was something surprising in Durov arrest.
> Like entrapment, this is action is about as low and debased as it gets.
There is no entrapment here. Entrapment is illegal in France. Durov was arrested as part of an investigation on Telegram practices. Law inforcement was not in anyway part of Telegarm not respecting the law.
> The French Government could have banned Telegram across French territories
The issue is not about Telegram as an application which is and remains perfectly legal. The issue is with Telegram as a company which is not helping in criminal investigations. Why should France ban a legal application?
Putin visiting Mongolia when there is an ICC arrest warrant for him is the same type of gamble.
I read that the guy is free now but he is not allowed to leave France.
If you ignore the missing human rights activists were using telegram and then suddenly disappeared.
as pointed out before, telegram is utterly compromised security wise. Its really advantageous that "naughty people" are documenting their stuff there as it leaves a loverly indelible trail of actions.
What human rights activists? What kind of gaslighting is that?
What are your sources on "utterly compromised security on telegram"?
Have you looked at the "encrypted" protocol? Wonderfully complex, and the key authority is telegram, with little to no way to spot bait and switch. But thats the "secret" messaging. Everything else is plain text and stored centrally.
its basically facebook/slack with better cyrillic support.
[1] https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/AJiEAwIYFoAsBGJBjZwYoQIwFM...
It would be a huge stretch of imagination to say Telegram is savings lives.
The guy who is presumed to be the murderer is an ex-intelligence officer, not currently employed by the intelligence services.
> It is even possible that Durov has saved lives by not communicating user information to the french intelligence services.
And exactly how many did he condemned by letting criminal network run wild on his platform, with little to no moderation, and no collaboration with police forces ?
There's a "he resigned two weeks ago" meme in Russia. Every time a police officer or someone else from the government is caught red-handed committing a crime, it "turns out" they have allegedly resigned a few weeks prior to the incident. It seems Putin's regime is not an aberration, they're trailblazers.
You can find a lot of information on french media, like https://www.leparisien.fr/faits-divers/reseau-franc-macon-de...
What would be more concerning is that current member of the DGSE were planning a murder (in the same article). But then again, they were arrested, and this is why we know what likely happened to Pasquali. This is not Russia where the FSB can run wild.
Finally, I do find it strange to argue with a brand new account who basically just post to defend Telegram.
Why do you find it strange? Do you consider self compilation of a dossier on yourself a healthier practice?
The main takeaway here is that Durov is not being arrested strictly because his platform contains illegal material. He is being arrested because (allegedly)
- he is aware of the illegal material, and - he refuses to cooperate with law enforcement to remove that material.
So the French authorities are charging him with being complicit in a lot of this stuff.
Platforms like Signal can get away with this because they are properly E2E encrypted, and cannot identify illegal content. Telegram, on the other hand, has decryption keys for the messages and media sent in group chats, meaning they can identify and remove illegal content if they choose to.
I feel like I must emphasize this because it's repeatedly missed. Telegram has mainly 3 different components. The first is a server-side encrypted messaging platform, which is unremarkable, and as-secure as Discord or Slack. The second is its "E2EE" system, secret chats, which don't sync, and have not been broken (though people have raised some concerns historically about it). The third system is channels, which are basically subscription feeds from users. Channels are as secure as Slack or Discord or Twitter or Facebook. The whole point of Channels is that you can subscribe to channels and get messages in Telegram from them, but they're basically open access. A good example is Durov's channel: https://t.me/s/durov
Now I say all of this because the vast majority of people believe that E2EE would solve the problem here. The reality is that channels doesn't make sense to be E2EE since anyone can join, and channels are where are a large amount of the "interesting" content to law enforcement occurs. Abuse definitely occurs to some degree on all 3 components, but channels simply don't exist in Signal, as an example.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat...
(The downside of course is that it's then also open to «bad actors».)
Signal isn't magically protected by proper E2E encryption. When the time comes to take them down legally, all that's needed is evidence from end users phones demonstrating illegal activities occurring over Signal. But - for now - Signal seems to have better friends and or be upsetting less authorities than Telegram.
To me it's pretty clear reason why they've gone after Telegram is the Channels and Groups. Seen from a certain perspective Telegram channels are an alternative to Reddit, and have been popular medium during COVID and the Ukraine war for "alternative news". By now Reddit is properly controlled and subdued but Telegram isn't.
No, that's non sense. It is perfectly legal to operate a E2E encrypted platform in the EU.
What would be illegal is for Signal to refuse to answer when asked for information by the justice system. As long as they are cooperative and provide what they can - even if it's not much - everything is alright.
This is full on speculation. Right now the reality is you can buy underage people, drugs and weapons on telegram. ISIS recruitment channels, etc.
Playing the "free speech" card is disingenuous.
The only issue is, their team is way too small for moderation, which is why so many weird communities keep popping up.
I’ve been on Telegram for 5 years and I’ve yet to see anything of what you mentioned in your comment.
It’s a fear mongering tactic against a perfectly good and arguably the best messenger application in existence right now.
When I activated the function to find people around me, most of the time I was spending in Telegram was leaving and reporting such groups.
Some of the channels, even discoverable by simple search, were years old.
"Arguably" Element is way better than Telegram, it actually properly encrypts private chats AND allows sync between devices
Speculation is a crucial part of decision-making, especially in geopolitics, where hard data is often scarce. Governments frequently act on leading indicators to preempt potential threats, whether it's about national security or information control. Dismissing this as "pure speculation" overlooks how critical decisions are made in complex, rapidly evolving situations.
> Playing the "free speech" card is disingenuous.
This isn't about free speech; it's about narrative control, especially with the upcoming U.S. election. Controlling platforms like Telegram and TikTok is crucial for influencing public discourse. Recent U.S. regulations targeting TikTok further highlight how critical it is for governments to manage the flow of information as elections approach.
This is a very slippery slope.
I don't see a problem with requiring a company to cooperate with a court order to release data. However if a company does not have this data (because it's encrypted) it should not be liable or be required to collect such data.
ISPs hand over phone records and anything else they have on people. They set wiretaps, they can triangulate users, you name it. When the government asks Telegram for information, they get a history dump. When they ask a carrier for information, they get a history dump (for anything stored on ISP servers, such as email or some text messages, depending on the warrant) _and a live copy of every bit of information that flows over the connection_.
Email inboxes get handed over all the time, and server hosts must take down content within days to hours depending on how illegal the content reported is. Services like Google have been handing out information like "what users were in this general area at this time" because they track that stuff (which is why Android's location history has degraded significantly; Google moved that stuff to on-device storage for this reason).
As for data collection: in some places, the government can force you to collect data. Some "logless" VPN/email providers have been compelled to turn on logging for certain accounts, for instance.
The alternative, which was almost a thing in the early internet, was that ISPs were responsible for all content on their systems.
The whole issue is that they don't. Telegram doesn't provide information when asked to by law inforcement. That's literally the reason Durov is being charged.
Very far. but france is a civil law system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_responsibility_in_Fre...)
if you don't comply with legally valid requests, then you are going to be held liable for it.
But thats the same in common law as well. If an hosting provider in the USA refuses to act on reports of hosting copyrighted material, then they are liable for damages. Safe Harbour has its limits.
That's why we don't have network operators for criminals. We have seen the demand for it in the crypto(as in cryptocurrency) space and many went to prison for running networks and tools for criminals, especially people running cryptocurrency tumblers were caught, prosecuted and imprisoned.
I don't believe in a CEO that takes on the law enforcement for higher morals or even money, that's mafia's line of work. In some cases maybe its possible to have high moral outlaws but they will have to shoot at the police when they are coming to make an arrest.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41390173
(Algorithmic feeds are very popular amongst platforms, not sure that Telegram does that too though ?)
> This is a very slippery slope.
I wonder what is hard to understand. Is there CP/violent content in Instagram? Nope. In Facebook? Nope. In YouTube? nope.
Why? These companies are held responsible for the public content, published in clear, on their platforms and they enforce moderation to remove illegal content.
Telegram is in clear and has public content violating the law. They should have done the same, they did not.
And then there's likely a real CP sharing groups on some of those platforms: algorithms work as invisible cloak for those groups, and we in the public without that preference won't have idea until police discovers one through a confiscated phone.
The fact that you can't understand the difference between facebook/youtube and an ISP.
An ISP would have to vet every site they open up to their users. Which would effectively incentivize an AOL like internet with just 5-10 websites.
Yes. Infact you can find public groups, pages and channels posting all kind of illegal stuff (drugs, weapons, fraud, dox..)
Yes there is... and a lot of it.
Facebook is especially bad at moderation.
If you host illegal content from your home network, the police alert your ISP, and the ISP did nothing, you can be sure the police will arrest them too.
They are already liable unless they follow the law to enjoy certain exemptions.
er...did you miss the last twenty years?
the US government destroyed a website for prostitution ads: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/backpage-principals-convicted...
the US government has destroyed every darknet market they could find, despite most of them not selling any drugs themselves.
CSAM is taken extremely seriously and any web site that hosts it will be pursued to the end of the earth.
etc.
this is not a new thing at all.
> However if a company does not have this data (because it's encrypted) it should not be liable or be required to collect such data.
Telegram deliberately and suspiciously encrypts approximately nothing in a way that helps anyone, so this is completely irrelevant.
I found it a little low on detail, though.
https://www.tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr/sites/default/files...
It's a laundry list of accessory to commit crimes + a few interesting associated ones like organising to commit crimes, and laundering the proceeds of crimes.
I wonder about this: «Fourniture d'un moyen de cryptologie n'assurant pas exclusivement des fonctions d'authentification ou de contrôle d'intégrité sans déclaration préalable,» Do you happen to know what making that declaration involves?
From the law 2004-575 [1], section 1, article 30:
> I. - L'utilisation des moyens de cryptologie est libre.
> II. - La fourniture, le transfert depuis ou vers un Etat membre de la Communauté européenne, l'importation et l'exportation des moyens de cryptologie assurant exclusivement des fonctions d'authentification ou de contrôle d'intégrité sont libres.
> III. - La fourniture, le transfert depuis un Etat membre de la Communauté européenne ou l'importation d'un moyen de cryptologie n'assurant pas exclusivement des fonctions d'authentification ou de contrôle d'intégrité sont soumis à une déclaration préalable auprès du Premier ministre, sauf dans les cas prévus au b du présent III. Le fournisseur ou la personne procédant au transfert ou à l'importation tiennent à la disposition du Premier ministre une description des caractéristiques techniques de ce moyen de cryptologie, ainsi que le code source des logiciels utilisés. Un décret en Conseil d'Etat fixe :
> a) Les conditions dans lesquelles sont souscrites ces déclarations, les conditions et les délais dans lesquels le Premier ministre peut demander communication des caractéristiques du moyen, ainsi que la nature de ces caractéristiques ;
> b) Les catégories de moyens dont les caractéristiques techniques ou les conditions d'utilisation sont telles que, au regard des intérêts de la défense nationale et de la sécurité intérieure ou extérieure de l'Etat, leur fourniture, leur transfert depuis un Etat membre de la Communauté européenne ou leur importation peuvent être dispensés de toute formalité préalable.
> IV. - Le transfert vers un Etat membre de la Communauté européenne et l'exportation d'un moyen de cryptologie n'assurant pas exclusivement des fonctions d'authentification ou de contrôle d'intégrité sont soumis à autorisation du Premier ministre, sauf dans les cas prévus au b du présent IV. Un décret en Conseil d'Etat fixe :
> a) Les conditions dans lesquelles sont souscrites les demandes d'autorisation ainsi que les délais dans lesquels le Premier ministre statue sur ces demandes ;
> b) Les catégories de moyens dont les caractéristiques techniques ou les conditions d'utilisation sont telles que, au regard des intérêts de la défense nationale et de la sécurité intérieure ou extérieure de l'Etat, leur transfert vers un Etat membre de la Communauté européenne ou leur exportation peuvent être soit soumis au régime déclaratif et aux obligations d'information prévus au III, soit dispensés de toute formalité préalable.
Basically, any cryptography exported/imported that is not about authentication or integrity control, or a set of other exceptions, needs to be approved from the Prime Minister's office.
The exceptions and formalities are defined in the relevant decree [2] and it's annex defining the full list of exceptions [3] (Ctrl/Cmd+F "ANNEXE 1"). The procedure to ask for authorisation is to send a special type of letter a month before going into production, and if you don't hear back within a month (the directorate has a month to ask for more information), all is good. They can request the source code, and forbid use if they decide it's against the nations interests. The list of exceptions is quite exhaustive, e.g. it includes cryptography aboard single board computers for personal use, banking, TV encryption, etc.
Interestingly, there's this part:
> Equipements spécialement conçus et limités pour assurer la protection de logiciels ou de données informatiques contre la copie ou l’utilisation illicite et dont la capacité cryptographique n’est pas accessible à l’utilisateur.
So, if I'm reading this correctly, if Telegram was end to end encrypted, they wouldn't have had to declare to the PM.
How the declaration
1 - https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/JORFTEXT0000...
2 - https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000646995
3 - https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/download/pdf?id=y0_q3mVjGocOR...
I wonder whether that final exception is intended to cover the kind of end-to-end encryption Signal does, or rather the kind of end-to-end encryption the Netflix app does. Digital rights management. It's not clear to me that those can be separated — doesn't Jitsi use the same in-browser code as Vimeo? But it's also not clear to me what "not accessible to the user" means, exactly.
Somewhat relevant :
HDMI Forum rejects AMD's HDMI 2.1 open-source driver :
Only exports have to be approved. Imports are solely subjected to a declaration (which involves handing over the source code).
And yes, the point is to get their hands on the source code of encryption protocoles to give it to their information agencies. Welcome to the real world.
> So, if I'm reading this correctly, if Telegram was end to end encrypted, they wouldn't have had to declare to the PM.
You are not reading this correctly. Providing E2E chats is giving access to the encryption functionality to end users.
That's not little low on details.
Has played a role, sure, enough to talk about it in public, but I expected to see what the prosecutor thought would be enough for a court.
Telegram has legal obligations and we all know they haven't fulfilled them-you can easily verify that on your own: you don't need to be a government agency to do that - open telegram and use the search function, hell even the auto suggestions lead you to a ton of illegal stuff.
- Durov is, according to him, living in exile outside of Russia since 2014 - due to Russian gov persecution.
- Since his "exile" - he has travelled 50-60 times to Russia https://www.reddit.com/r/Telegram/comments/1f2pgg3/pavel_dur...
- Most Russian billionaires that live in exile and are persecuted by the RU gov fall from windows (or something tall) quite often. Durov has been living lavishly though.
- Russia is trying to protect him now that he is being charged.
i.e. a lot of odd and contradicting moments.
Telegram was also blocked in Russia for a period of time while they argued about compliance [1].
I think it is far more likely that Russia understands that Durov is one of the most influential people that acts as an emissary to their country. His past altercations around VK and subsequent compliance with various investigations in Russia probably mean they have at least a semi-amicable relationship now. The reality is that, for better or for worse, Telegram is widely used by a large number of people. In just the same way that US agencies can compel investigations with US companies, I'm sure that Russia exerts some amount of control on Telegram for investigation purposes. But this is what I would expect about any messaging platform that isn't fully E2EE.
The fact of the matter is that Telegram's flagship product for many people is NOT the messaging system, it's the non-encrypted channels system, which has been used widely by various people to act as a social network. This system is valuable to investigate for a lot of people. Encrypted messaging aside, companies usually are compelled to do a minimum amount of compliance work with authorities for jurisdictions they operate in.
[1]: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/whats-...
Not in the same way, since Telegram (unlike, say, vKontakte), is NOT a Russian company.
(At least officially, also quite anti-Putin at its funding... less clearly now.)
That "fact" is disputed. The source of that information appears to have relied on unverified information, among other issues.
I do find it odd that Russia is working so hard to get him out of France, though.
We're simply led to believe that Telegram (a 950M user base) is developed by a Pavel, his brother, and their "friends" in Dubai. There's no evidence of any physical office in Dubai, too.
In short, there's very little evidence to corroborate their story.
Isn't the whole narrative that Durov, who is essentially extremely rich as a result of building VK, bankrolled the whole creation? For all of the criticism, Telegram remains one of the most highly polished and well-designed apps I've ever used. It doesn't get bogged down with lots of messages, and has regular feature-rich updates. It seems to me like Telegram has one of the best development teams on the planet in terms of sheer output. Maybe they don't need to compete on talent simply because they're paid well by Durov?
Or because they're staffed by the Kremlin!
You cannot be serious. A service with a billion users and Telegram’s feature-richness and complexity cannot be maintained by a few people. If it’s true that there are no Telegram alums on LinkedIn, etc., that is deeply suspicious.
FWIW, I co-run a quanty multifamily investment office, and all of our employees (including partners) are expressly forbidden from listing their workplace on LinkedIn - which is the norm for family offices. We simply write Family Office and call it a day. In return, the firm will take care of you and your family for generations - extensive compensation but also other perks that you will never get in other jobs at any level.
Le Monde couldn't figure out why he gotten that citizenship, there is very little detail.
>Durov was naturalized as a French citizen in August 2021, giving him European Union citizenship. Le Monde described the naturalisation as "mysterious", since Durov had not resided in France apart from brief visits. Le Monde suggested that Durov was naturalised via the rarely used "merit foreigner" procedure that is awarded directly by the French government to people viewed to have contributed exceptionally to France's international influence or international economic relations.
In other words don't be too quick in condemning channels which allow voices outside the desired narrative to be heard because the day might come than you need to step outside it. Given that you seem to recognise 'disinfo' - given your claim of Telegram being the main source of it - you can just ignore it just like others ignore what they consider or know to be falsehoods.
I can tell from the sidelines that you guys "doing your own research" and "staying informed" is a net negative for a society.
Yeah the only difference is that one person is right and the other person is wrong.
> The recent acknowledgement by Zuckerberg that the Biden/Harris regime pressured them into censoring information should give you some thought about what is 'disinfo'.
Of course they fucking did, and so they should have. Also, you think the current Republican controlled senate hasn't applied any "pressure" to obtain this statement right now for their bullshit committee?
Facebook's statement doesn't say they shut down anything factual, just that they took down a bunch of covid content "including humour and satire". The shit they took down was still disinfo. The entire anti-vaccination movement is libertarian propaganda (why do you think there's no anti-anaesthetics movement? It's made by the same companies, used about as widely and is orders of magnitude more dangerous).
> In other words don't be too quick in condemning channels which allow voices outside the desired narrative to be heard because the day might come than you need to step outside it
It's patently obvious that Telegram is a Russian operation. The messages aren't really encrypted, the founder isn't really in exile, and oh it just so happens that all the most batshit crazy conspiracy theories originate there.
for one, I've never been required to get anesthesia as a condition of employment. lumping all vaccines together is not productive and we don't do that when discussing painkillers. there is a movement against OxyContin but not a movement against Ibuprofen.
You've been required to get anaesthesia as a condition of getting dental work done, or any number of routine day procedures, or more serious operations. Maybe you've never had to have anaesthetic at all, but you certainly will at some point in your life.
> lumping all vaccines together is not productive and we don't do that when discussing painkillers. there is a movement against OxyContin but not a movement against Ibuprofen
There is no "movement against oxycontin". There are a slew of well documented and successful legal cases against Purdue for its misleading advertising of Oxy in the US, but there's not like, a groundswell of conspiracy theories about it. In fact, the way that the Oxy case has played out is a good example of what real conspiracy looks like, and how it shows up in the legal system.
Sure there are accidental overdoses in other countries, and people everywhere every day are either hospitalised or die from accidental or intentional overdoses of opioids, but not to the same scale. The way that it's played out in the US worse than anywhere else and is as much to do with the dysfunctional nature of the healthcare system that allowed Purdue to behave the way it did, as it is to do with the drugs themselves.
Compared to that, the covid vaccine story (and story about vaccines generally) is a case in point about what a manufactured conspiracy theory looks like and how it shows up in the legal system (ie. a series of politically motivated lawsuits that fall along party lines).
Odd, that has always been optional where I've lived - the Netherlands and Sweden, mostly. I understand that is is a requirement for very large operations but for normal procedures it has never been a requirement.
> covid vaccine story (and story about vaccines generally)
Why do you insist on lumping together these two very disparate cases? There is an enormous gap between the small cohort of people who distrust established vaccines - e.g. those administered to children, those needed when travelling to the tropics, etc. - and the large cohort who distrust the experimental SARS2 therapeutics which were forced upon the masses in different ways. All you achieve by lumping these two together is to increase distrust in established vaccines, both by exposing the second cohort to the arguments of the first as well as by the fact that the negative side effects of the SARS2 therapeutics are slowly but surely being published to a wider audience.
Says everyone. While there are clear examples where this is the case - e.g. SARS2 vaccines do not protect against infection nor do they protect against infecting others - there are many other situations where 'right' and 'wrong' are not so clearly defined. When someone claims a certain party or presidential candidate is a 'threat to democracy' there is no clear 'right' or 'wrong' as these are opinions, not facts.
Your following statements with regards to the 'current Republican-controlled senate' show where your bias lies and explains why you react the way you do. Now try to step outside your bubble for a while - and yes, you are in a bubble just like most others (myself included) are - and step in another one, say the bubble inhabited by a Russian or someone who supports the current Russian regime. That person would consider it 'patently obvious that Facebook (et al) are American operations. The messages can be intercepted by the operators who censor on behalf of the American regime.
If you are happy using platforms which are controlled by this or that government, fine. I prefer to be able to say what I want without either the American or Russian or French or Swedish or Dutch (etc.) governments interfering or censoring so I run my own services. This happens to be dead-easy and nearly maintenance-free.
Telegram is used by Russia, terror groups, and so on.
It's always funny to hear people talk about free speech in that situation.
As well as a lot of people in CIS countries (including Ukraine), people fed up with Meta and probably 95% of Android custom ROM communities (wild guess, do not quote me on that).
Not to mention platforms like, for example, Discord. Also used in Russia. Also probably used by terror groups. But it's okay because we are supposed to like "our" platform.
>It's always funny to hear people talk about free speech in that situation.
Also one big difference might be that Discord is part of the Deep Web (requiring an account and an invitation to its chatrooms to even see what is going on there), while Telegram seems to be mostly on the Open Web, even providing an interface to be crawled ?
Good to know it's yet another one in the never-ending Tencent spectrum.
>Telegram seems to be mostly on the Open Web, even providing an interface to be crawled ?
Theoretically yes, but in practice I've found it only works good with big (as in, popular - with a lot of members) channels, and even then history is wonky and you can't grab files without an account. Pictures do work fine, videos don't AFAIR.
Didn’t we have months and months of this discussion around the last US presidential election? Haven’t we had this discussion years ago when piracy was rampant on ”surface web” sites?
Businesses have always had legal requirements based on the nature of their trade.
What France is doing is unjust. They should stop. If their laws are not just they should be repealed.
Edit: the argument about Durov not ”trying to do anything” after the French requests don't seem that relevant as it aligns with “I tried” excuse of a poor student’s missing homework, i.e. trying isn’t enough - crimes are either stopped or they aren’t.
Edit2: ha @ downvotes w/o any opinions.
What a superficial take. Following the same logic, highway management would be held accountable if a killer used one of their roads to go and commit a crime.
But for platform providers, they (the providers) have the responsibility to moderate the content that is hosted publicly on their platforms. Which most of the content on Telegram is. And if some illegal material is there, they (the providers) have the responsibility to take it offline.
Do you have any idea how much, let's say Meta, spends in terms of money and manpower to prevent this? How much moderation goes on for most of the platforms? Read about regulations in France (SREN law IIRC).
"Telegram has played a role in multiple criminal cases in France tied to child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and online hate crimes, but has shown a “near-total absence” of response to requests for cooperation from law enforcement, Ms. Beccuau said."
That's a very bad take. The charges are because of Telegram repeatedly refusing or being too slow to take down illegal content (illegal in France, that is): child pornography, drugs ads, etc. Meta and X both remove illegal content when a notice from authorities is made, unlike Telegram which drags its feet.
If Telegram was encrypted e2e, Durov would not have been able to know of the existence of that illegal content, and could have plausible deniability. As it stands though, Telegram was notified of publicly available illegal content, and refused to remove it, which is a crime in France, where Durov is a citizen.
Why is this important? Do you think he would not have been arrested if he had not had a French passport? I would think that all that matters is that his crimes fall under French jurisdiction.
I agree, I don't like double standards
> why when elon musk seized it he could bring down pedopornography by double digit percentage in a few weeks?
I am not sure if I got this right. I was under the impression that illegal and extreme content and bots on twitter only grew as Elon seized it. He fired a majority of his moderation staff, right?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-07/elon-musk...
They all cooperate with governments: https://www.engadget.com/authorities-reportedly-ordered-goog...
In fact, google is partly CIA/NSA
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...
Or that the charges are false?
Or that the charges are true but only enforced because they want him for other reasons?
Go and look at "Safe Harbour" rules. Its not a blank cheque to say "oh it wasn't us, it was the users". your protection from being sanctioned is contingent on complying with requests to take down posts(be that copyright or other).
The same thing applies here