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.
Other encrypted platforms: we have no data so we can’t turn over data
Telegram: we collect it all. No you can’t know who is posting child abuse content
Wait, telegram has collected it, knows about and, ultimately condones it? Or is it more of a wilful ignorance and resistance to forced compliance?
It’s definitely not willfully ignorance given they collect the data.
It’s clearly wrong. Matrix does have non-encrypted channels and honestly most of publicly accessible channels are non-encrypted. Do you consider matrix also on the Dame “bucket” as telegram? In matrix you can created encrypted channels but they work very badly in terms of performance with huge number of people like 1000+
Matrix isnt a corpo shill singularity. Its a large amount of home servers talking to each other. This is like comparing the concept of email to being the same as telegram. You could target AOL, or Yahoo, ProtonMail, Google and on and on and on, but just saying “Matrix” isnt correct for this argument.
Most of the matrix users use matrix central homeserver so it’s valid argument
Doesnt change the fact that Matrix is not a single company.