Telegram CEO's arrest sparks flurry of questions over motivation, privacy impact

Updated at 4:45pm EST with new details about charges against Durov.

When Eva Galperin heard that Pavel Durov, the founder of the popular messaging service Telegram, was arrested in Paris over the weekend, she quickly got in touch with French privacy and legal experts.

Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a prominent digital freedoms advocate, said her immediate fear was that the French government was trying to crack down on how Telegram treats end-to-end encryption. Governments around the globe have denounced the use of the technology in recent years, as they aggressively pursue information from digital platforms as “essentially a demand for a back door,” Galperin said.

By Tuesday, however, she was reassured that the French prosecutor’s allegations of Durov’s cryptography offenses were relatively minor, and that they appear to merely relate to Telegram having not completed required paperwork.

“It's not crazy,” Galperin told Recorded Future News in an interview. “It does not appear to be a punishment for having end-to-end encryption.”

As for the more serious offenses cited by French authorities — that Durov and Telegram have enabled the possession and sharing of child pornography, as well as the distribution and sales of narcotics — Galperin said it is too early for her to take a position on whether they’re legitimate.

Durov was charged Wednesday and is now being formally investigated for committing a range of offenses, including being complicit in facilitating the distribution of child porn and drug sales on the platform. 

He was additionally charged for failing to comply with law enforcement requests, which has been a source of longtime tension between the platform and police around the world.

Telegram is notorious for not responding to law enforcement inquiries and takedown requests, a fact which has made governments around the world “testy” and has provoked temporary bans or threats of disruption in many countries, including Brazil and Germany, Galperin said.

The messaging service has a culture of “very laissez-faire moderation,” she said, adding that “a lot of illegal things happen on the platform’s unencrypted channels.”

Telegram’s unique approach towards moderation, as well as its ubiquity in Russia, where Durov was born, has led to a flurry of questions and theories about the arrest. For example, some have questioned whether the Kremlin had itself been planning to crack down on Telegram, while others have pointed out that French President Emmanuel Macron has been an avid user of Telegram and met Durov several times before he obtained a French passport in 2021.

The confusion has put privacy experts in a difficult position because it’s hard to determine whether the arrest should be viewed as part of a broader campaign against encryption and civil liberties.

Reading through the French prosecutor's press release re: Pavel Durov and Telegram, it's still not clear what is going on, but the last three items are a big red flag. pic.twitter.com/EcYotgGmlb

— Eva (@evacide) August 26, 2024

The platform’s policies don’t always make it easy to defend, however.

Its lack of “communication channels” with their users or with civil society means “there's no really meaningful way to report any kind of problems or get feedback,” Natalia Krapiva, senior tech legal counsel at the digital freedom advocacy organization Access Now, said in an interview with Recorded Future News.

However, Krapiva said, Access Now still finds news of Durov’s arrest very worrying.

“We are definitely concerned about governments, any governments, using these kinds of heavy-handed measures, like potential criminal prosecution,” she said.

French authorities have been investigating Durov since July. 

Krapiva said Access Now cannot categorically criticize Durov’s arrest because it is unclear what evidence against him has been amassed.

“We don't know whether Durov had knowledge about alleged crimes,” she said.

However, in principle pursuing a platform CEO on criminal charges for content moderation practices is a problem, Krapiva added.

Durov told the Financial Times earlier this year that he planned to bolster Telegram’s content moderation practices with unfolding elections taking place worldwide.

Still, he told the interviewer the platform will limit its interference unless users “cross red lines.” 

“I don’t think that we should be policing people in the way they express themselves”, Durov told the interviewer. “Otherwise, we can quickly degrade into authoritarianism.”

It is a point that prominent digital freedom advocates also have made.

"Arresting platform executives because of their alleged failures to sufficiently moderate content, even content as disturbing and harmful as content that harms children, starts us down a dangerous road that threatens free expression and gives too much power to the government to suppress speech,” Kate Ruane, Director of the Center for Democracy and Techology’s Free Expression Project, said in a statement.

“Giving governments that kind of power will allow them to censor even legal content, harming human rights and endangering privacy and free expression in the process,” she added.

While the American Civil Liberties Union, a staunch critic of government interference in private communications, has notably declined to take a position on the case pending the release of more information, Durov has plenty of vocal defenders whose comments on social media seem to suggest categorical support. 

Former National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden posted on X that Durov’s arrest is an “assault on the basic human rights of speech and association.”

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson was even more emphatic.

“Pavel Durov sits in a French jail tonight, a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies,” Carlson said on X. “Darkness is descending fast on the formerly free world.”

Elon Musk, who posted several times on the First Amendment implications of the arrest, was more sarcastic, saying in one of his posts, “POV: It’s 2030 in Europe and you’re being executed for liking a meme.”