Thoughts on the Durov Arrest

> What it means is that European states are going to try to extraterritorially dictate to foreign companies what content those companies can and cannot host on foreign-based webservers

It looks like the author failed to grab that Durov asked for the French nationality and therefore is a French citizen who must comply to French law.

> Telegram is not the only company in the world which has a social media platform used for unlawful purposes

Except Telegram is the only one of those companies which intentionally doesn’t answers to legal requests. All other social networks are cooperating with law enforcers in the countries they operate.

Even Signal is cooperating when asked too. The difference is that unlike Signal, Telegram owns its users data in plaintext.

Also the author fails to understand that the complicity here doesn’t mean that companies in Europe are responsible for their users content. Like in the US, they are responsible if they fail to comply to laws in a reasonable time. Telegram doesn’t comply in a reasonable time since they voluntarily don’t comply at all. That’s a huge difference.

This article repeatedly referred to Telegraph as "encrypted" ("have full encryption on their services", "when you’re running a globally accessible encrypted platform"), which seems misleading, if by default, it is not end-to-end encrypted.

This is quite a one-sided take.

What makes Telegram unique is:

1) They have access to almost all the content

2) They try to use arguments about jurisdiction to avoid helping law enforcement with lawful requests

All the other messaging platforms (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage) have started to use end-to-end encryption to avoid being in this position in the first place. But they also comply with law enforcement and share the data they do have, and don't hinder lawful investigations.

The biggest issue with Telegram is that due to the lack of end-to-end encryption it is a huge security risk; how do you know the operators aren't selling access to your chats to some criminal actor or a repressive government agency? You don't.

> If, however, the French are simply saying that Durov’s failure to police his users or respond promptly to French document requests is the crime (which I suspect is the case), then this represents a dramatic escalation in the online censorship wars. What it means is that European states are going to try to extraterritorially dictate to foreign companies what content those companies can and cannot host on foreign-based webservers.

This completely ignores that the amount of criminal activity on Telegram in Europe as well as parts of Asia in itself has been escalating. The author is coming at this from a US-based point of view, which is fine, but unless you're particularly interested in the topic it's difficult for Americans to be aware of the scale of Telegram's role in criminality elsewhere, as this does not seem to be the case in the US. Maybe someone here knows why Telegram is not as core to organized crime in the US, and what communication methods are used there. But it's clear that in Europe and parts of Asia, its role is massive, and has been growing and growing without a limit in sight. This is easy to underestimate.

In these parts of the world, the scale of it is of a completely different magnitude than criminal activity on e.g. Facebook, which the author brings up but is a misguided comparison. And that's ignoring the relative percentages of legit vs criminal activity, which are inverted (if not worse) between the two platforms, because that's not as important.

Scale and absolute numbers, the absolute detrimental effect on society, matter.

I don't see this as an escalation because there was always going to be a line somewhere. A line where the amount of criminal activity on a platform, which when crossed , was going to cause arrests. Telegram's continuous growth in this aspect means that the line has now been crossed.

And in reality, this line exists anywhere even in the US. It might be higher, but it's still there. The idea of not having such a line is clearly insane - that would mean no matter if something completely destroys society, we're going to let it pass. Such lines are almost never enshrined in law, for obvious reasons. They only become visible to everyone as they are crossed.