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Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

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Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#551
post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of the nature of the encryption, it allows more convenience compared to WhatsApp and Signal. For example, on Telegram you can (and we do) have a million people in a group without exposing their phone numbers. This has proven itself to be extremely useful to protestors. Signal failed massively, you couldn't add too many people and you always had the risk of exposing the phone numbers. Along with that, you can…

"The chats instantly appear after login. " I agree, that is very convenient. Also for the secret police officer.. I use telegram as social media, but I really would not use it to organize protest somewhere. Then the whole safety depends on whether Durov made a deal with the secret police, or them infiltrating the servers to know everything about anyone involved. What they liked at what time, what pictures they shared…

> them infiltrating the servers to know everything about anyone involved

That's not a possibility. Split-key encryption doesn't allow such a thing to happen.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because those providers cooperate with authorities and moderate their content to a fairly large degree?

For Reddit it is a bit documented how some power-mods used to flood subreddits with child porn to get them taken down. It was seemingly done with the administration's best wishes. Not sure if it still going on, but some of these people are certainly around, in the same positions.

That’s disgusting but certainly effective to take down something very quickly.

I was very disappointed to hear that UFO related subreddits take down and block UFO sightings. What’s the whole point of the sub if they censor the relevant content.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a criminal lawyer who is providing defense, that is acceptable because everyone is entitled to to a fair trial and defense. If you are a criminal lawyer who is directly abetting in criminal behavior (eg. a Saul Goodman type) you absolutely will lose your Bar License and open yourself up to criminal penalties. If you are a criminal lawyer who is in a situation where your client wants you to abet their crimi…

There was a recent gang related case in Georgia where several defense lawyers were charged for being a little too involved.

Are you talking about Brian Steel? He was held in contempt because he refused to name his source that informed him of some misconduct by the judge (ex parte communication with a witness). That's hardly relevant here, the client wasn't involved at all as far as anyone knows.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Lawyertalk/comments/1dd32ji/brian_s...

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, like selling gasoline to the getaway car driver?

> and you knew about the illegal behavior Your analogy is terrible and doesn’t make sense. If you provide a service that is used for illegal behavior AND you know it’s being used that way AND you explicitly market your services to users behaving illegally AND the majority of your product is used for illegal deeds THEN you’re gonna have a bad time. If one out of ten thousand people use your product for illegal deeds y…

> If one out of ten thousand people use your product for illegal deeds you’re fine.

This logic clearly makes the prison of someone like the owner of Telegram difficult to justify, since 99.999% of messages in telegram are completely legal.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#555
post #99

A lot of really terrible takes in this comment section. Telegram didn't have encrypted groups by default, and telegram possessed a lot of content on their servers that they had been made aware was illegal and didn't cooperate. Nothing more, nothing less. The comparisons to other providers is off base because either other providers are cooperating more when they possess actionable, unencrypted information and taking s…

A sane comment in the slew of conspiracy theories, "service provider" apologists and misdirection of encryption being the issue.

> "service provider" apologists

I sincerely doubt that Telegram makes most of it's money by being this kind of host. I don't generally give the government the benefit of the doubt when it comes to _communication_ platforms. I also see zero evidence that Telegram's existence or policies help promote or create crime in any way.

It's not conspiratorial to refuse to show deference to the government which currently only has vague accusations to justify jailing a CEO. If the French government was so concerned about the criminal aspect then they should just order Telegram to not operate in France or they should work to block it at a national level.

The problem, the reaction, and the solution are not at all aligned here. Why anyone would jump in to defend the government's actions is absolutely beyond me.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#556
post #509
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y'know, illegal.

I'm appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime. Why aren't all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.

Even worse, in the US they clearly go out of their way to lobby for no control of gun sales. They should be indicted as facilitating crime.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#557
post #509
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y'know, illegal.

I'm appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime. Why aren't all gun manufacturers in jail then? They must know a percentage of their products are going to be used to commit crimes. A much larger percentage than those using Telegram to commit one.

> I'm appalled that you would argue in good faith that a tool for communicating in secret can be reasonably described as a service used to commit a crime.

The usual metaphor is child pornography, but let's pick something less outrageous: espionage. If a spy uses your messaging platform to share their secrets without being detected & prevented, that's using the service to commit a crime. Now, if you're making a profit from said service, that doesn't necessarily make you a criminal, but if you start saying "if spies used this platform, they'd never be stopped or even detected", that could get you in to some serious trouble. If you send a sales team to the KGB to encourage them to use the platform, even more so.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#558
post #515
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know your services are going to be used to commit a crime, then yes, that makes you an accessory and basically all jurisdictions (I know basically nothing about French criminal law) can prosecute you for that. Crime is, y'know, illegal.

Shouldn't gmail be closing as they know a percentage will be used for crime?

The answer to this charade is that to "prove" that you're not doing anything wrong you need to secretly provide all data from anyone that the government doesn't like. Otherwise you go to jail.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#559
post #49
post #6

Telegram is genuinely the best general communication platform I have ever used, by far. I really hope he has a good lawyer and this doesn't end up getting essentially murdered for creating it. When you create something that is objectively great, everyone will use it - including bad actors.

I use telegram for some group chats, but I'm not sure why tech-savvy people would like it so much – messages are not end-to-end encrypted which makes it an inferior choice compared to even whatsapp

At least on the beginning, when I looked into it, it had a very simple and well documented API. I guess it was the only messenger you could send a message with one line of code (of course not e2e encrypted). So it's very simple to send you a message from your home project.

Re: Arrest of Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO, charges of terrorism, fraud, child porn

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? we seal warrants in the US all the time - we don't want people who we are trying to apprehend to always know ahead of time we are trying to apprehend them

The US is on it’s way to becoming a dystopia so not the best argument…

That inconvenient bill of rights keeps us a step or two behind the rest of the anglosphere in decent to tyranny, but only for so long. It just takes a handful of dishonest judges to claim some right actually means something entirely different.
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