Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in Paris on Saturday by French police over a pending arrest warrant against him, according to a Reuters report. Durov, who holds dual citizenship of France and UAE, was reportedly arrested as part of preliminary investigation into a series of illegal activities on Telegram that have gone unchecked due to the platform's lax content moderation.
Founded in 2013, Telegram, like WhatsApp, offers end-to-end encryption ensuring that all messages between two people remain private and protected from interception by a third party including telcos or governments. This feature has made these apps immensely popular among privacy advocates.
However, many argue that lack of a robust content moderation on these encrypted services has made them the go to medium of communication among bad elements involved in money laundering, digital piracy, drug trafficking and sexual exploitation of children. Telegram is already under investigation in several countries including Russia, Germany and US over similar allegations.
Telegram has refuted the allegation that Durov is responsible for the illegal activities on the platform. “Telegram abides by EU laws, including the Digital Services Act — its moderation is within industry standards and constantly improving,” Telegram said in a statement.
While there is no denying that Telegram is being used by bad actors, many suspect that Telegram is being targeted to force them to break encryption and open private messages to government scrutiny.
“The arrest of Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association. I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means for gaining access to private communications. It lowers not only France, but the world,” said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in a post on X on August 25.
Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk also raised concern over Durov’s arrest with a post on X, which said, “being a free speech advocate these days is increasingly feeling like a Kobayashi Maru problem.”
With the growing adoption of private messaging, governments in many countries including India want service providers to deploy mechanisms to share information about people involved in illegal activities on their platform.
For instance, India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, require intermediaries, including the likes of WhatsApp and Telegram to trace posts and messages back to their source.
Privacy experts are of the view that to abide by such rules, platforms will have to either break encryption or retain metadata like timestamps of messages to trace the source. The problem is that many private messaging platforms such as Telegram and Signal retain very little data about users and their chat messages.
Telegram, with over 800 million monthly active users, is the third most popular messaging platform after WhatsApp and Snapchat, according to Statista. While WhatsApp still has the highest number of users, its reputation as a secure messaging platform took a hit in 2019 after hackers exploited a vulnerability in its video calling to secretly install the Pegasus spyware on smartphones of journalists, lawyers, activists and political opponents.
As a result, many of its users either switched to or also started using Signal or Telegram for private communication.
In 2020, Durov challenged WhatsApp’s privacy claims with the allegation that it has secretly built backdoors to comply with the law enforcement agencies to avoid backlash or a complete ban.
Durov said that backdoors are usually camouflaged as accidental security flaws.
“Enforcement agencies are not too happy with encryption, forcing app developers to secretly plant vulnerabilities in their apps. I know that because we’ve been approached,” said Durov in a blog post in 2020.
Telegram was banned by the Russian government in 2018 after it refused to share encryption keys of a private message. However, the ban was overturned in 2020. In 2018, Telegram was also banned in Iran over the suspicion that it was being used to encourage armed uprisings. The ban is still in place.
Though Telegram has refused to compromise user privacy and break encryption even in the face of a ban, it has occasionally cooperated with law enforcement agencies. In November 2022, Telegram complied with a Delhi High Court order by sharing the names, phone numbers and IP addresses of channel administrators accused of copyright infringement.
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