Pavel Durov, the billionaire founder and CEO of Telegram Messenger, was arrested last Saturday by French authorities. Authorities were executing an arrest warrant issued by (OFMIN), Office Mineurs which deals with offenses against children.
Local news reports indicate that the charges are due to Telegram’s lack of moderation on the platform, and that Pavel may be complicit in certain violations committed by Telegram users under French law.
A Brief History of Telegram
Telegram isn't Durov's first successful venture. That would be VKontakte, Russia's first social network that became immensely popular—even surpassing Facebook in the country. In 2012, when protests against Vladimir Putin were taking place on VKontakte, the FSB (Russia's Federal Security Service) asked Durov to censor these discussions and hand over data from the protesters.
Durov, known for outsmarting intelligence agencies, refused to comply. He even trolled investigators by sending them a pair of rusty keys, claiming they were Telegram's encryption keys.
His defiance came at a cost. After a video surfaced of him driving over a police officer's foot, Durov was forced to sell his shares in VKontakte and flee Russia. With the $300 million from the sale, he began work on his next project: an encrypted messaging app called Telegram.
In an interview with investigative journalist Yasha Levine—who exposed Signal as a US state-sponsored messaging app—Durov explained why they created their own encryption algorithm, MT-Proto, for Telegram. At the time, there were concerns about the NSA's influence on American cryptography standards, particularly after the agency successfully persuaded RSA to develop an algorithm with a potential backdoor.
Despite criticism from the American cryptography community, Telegram developed MT-Proto. While some complained that Telegram wasn't secure because its encryption algorithm wasn't based on de facto standards, no specific exploits were found.
To prove its security, Telegram has offered bounties of up to $300,000 for cracking its encryption. In a 2015 contest, participants could monitor traffic between two test users and even act as Telegram servers to try and determine secret information. No one claimed the bounty.
Telegram & Data Privacy
Can Telegram hand your data over to a local government? To this day, Telegram says they have never handed over a single byte of data to the government.
Telegram's data protection strategy is surprisingly robust. For cloud chats, which make up most conversations on the platform, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Data is stored in multiple data centers globally, controlled by different legal entities across various jurisdictions. Decryption keys are split and stored separately from the data they protect. Thanks to this structure, we can ensure that no single government can intrude on people's privacy and freedom of expression.
Telegram can only be forced to give up data if it's universal enough to pass through the scrutiny of several different legal systems around the world. To this day, they have disclosed zero bytes of user data to third parties, including government.
The company is registered in the UK as Telegram Messenger LLP, owned by two other companies located in the British Virgin Islands and Belize. This complex structure is part of Durov's strategy to make legal access to user data as difficult as possible for governments.
Since these decryption keys need to be in the memory of the server so that these servers can actually serve the data back to people who are requesting it; surely there must be a way to get the decryption keys to the server when it has to reboot. There has to be some aspect of sending the keys around, which Telegram could be using to keep its server maintenance in check.
Now that Durov is behind bars and awaiting to be sentenced, will he give up all of these different decryption keys that are needed for Telegram to supposedly hand over your data? If he was forced to, Durov could call up all of the administrators and engineers of Telegram's infrastructure and recollect all of the decryption keys so that authorities could get access to the data that they want.
However, If we look at Pavel's history, everything he's ever done, from outsmarting the FSB to pretty much rejecting any form of data requests or ignoring FBI agents that showed up at his Airbnb when spending a few days in San Francisco: is this a person who can be cornered?
I think we will see the real essence of who Pavel is, if he's going to comply with these demands, either quietly or publicly. But the inner circle of Telegram has said they've made plans to handle exactly this type of scenario. Under Pavel's arrest, the operation of the app will go on as normal. As a user, we haven't seen any changes.
Telegram Paid Features
I celebrate Telegram's victories because they were the platform that gave alternative viewpoints a voice, especially within the health freedom movement. Telegram has really been a place to gather for people who believe in the freedom of information and speech. For that reason, I've been a very big supporter of Telegram.
However, as of late, they have been incorporating some different features related to their paid model, Telegram Premium, that I’ve been skeptical of. One of the main concerns I have is the ability to restrict strangers from messaging you on Telegram.
I've recommended Telegram to friends and family member, but some of these family members and friends who were women were unfortunately harassed by random people on telegram messaging them out of the blue.
So with the intention of trying to keep yourself private and not bothered by random people, telegram should offer you the ability to not have any incoming messages. This is a feature that they've never offered in the past.
However, they recently updated this message restriction feature so that you can only allow messages from premium users. Basically, if you pay for a Telegram premium subscription, you can go ahead and message everyone on the platform: that is a spammers or scammers ideal situation to simply just pay to be able to message everyone on the platform.
Why would you paywall off the ability to not receive messages from anyone? This is supposed to be a private messenger. You don't want to get bothered by random people. No one should be able to pay for the privilege to message everyone else. I think that's unfair and definitely indicative that Telegram is making some strange choices.
There is also the issue of Telegram asking for people's birth date information, which is a new feature. You might have seen that banner at the top.
Conclusion
I understand the urge to keep this business model for Telegram sustainable, because the server costs must be incredibly high, but to ask for people's birthdays and to recommend their friends to buy them premium is just not going to work, at least for privacy conscious people like myself. Features like these are not indicative of a messenger that genuinely values your privacy.
We have to resist this level of censorship and intrusion. My hunch is that Pavel was one of the good guys. To be fair, he is sitting on an absolute extravagant amount of data. But I believe he has done his best to protect it, otherwise why would he be arrested? If he was really cooperating with the authorities and giving them what they want, he would likely be left alone.
Some people speculate that this arrest comes on behalf of powers like the United States and that could very well be true. Most of Telegram’s users come from these opposing anti-West countries, like Russia, Iran, China. Because of that, the Telegram chats still remain a valuable source of information for Western intel.
Resources
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine
https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op-85e
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-crypto-keepers-levine
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39448090
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Telegram/comments/19c99fy/how_is_this_privacy_friendly_why_is_this_not_a/
Support our work:
https://www.tiktok.com/@takebackourtech
https://x.com/abovephone
https://x.com/takebackourtech
t.me/takebackourtech
https://odysee.com/@takebackourtech:f
Telegram CEO's Arrest, Is Telegram Still Safe?