Telegram founder's arrest is radical — if it's a crime to build privacy tools, there will be no privacy
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Pavel Durov's arrest suggests that the law enforcement dragnet is being widened from private financial transactions to private speech.

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.

  • Neon 🏳️‍🌈🇺🇦🇪🇺🏳️‍⚧️🇹🇼🇮🇱🏳️‍🌈@lemmy.world
    613·
    3 months ago

    You’re thinking too far. As someone who knows two people that worked for the Swiss government closely:

    Don’t worry about it. The whole deepstate Idea is absolutely ridiculous.

    There is no big plan to weaken encryption or anything. There was probably a single prosecutor working on a case involving Telegram that saw his chance and took it.

    Seriously, you should be a lot more worried about google or meta, not western democracies.

    Unless you live in russia/china/iran/yourFavouriteDictatorship, then forget whatever I just said. But if you live there, what’s happening in France isn’t a Problem to you anymore since your government does it anyways lol

    But yeah, I’m getting a not tired of the deepstate conspiracies. He broke the law, that’s why he gets arrested, not because of some deepstate conspiracy

    • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
      163·
      3 months ago

      What are you on about?

      When legislation aiming to restrict people’s rights fails to pass, it is very common for legislators/governments to try again shortly thereafter, and then again, and again, until some version of it eventually does pass. With each revision, some wording might be replaced, or weak assurances added, or the most obvious targets changed to placate the loudest critics. It might be broken up in to several parts, to be proposed separately over time. But the overall goal remains the same. This practice is (part of) why vigilance and voting are so important in democracies.

      There’s nothing “deep state” about it. It’s plainly visible, on the record, and easily verifiable.

      As someone who knows two people that worked for the Swiss government closely

      This is an appeal to authority (please look it up) and a laughably weak one at that.

      There is no big plan to weaken encryption or anything.

      You obviously have not been keeping up with events surrounding this topic over the past 30 years.

    • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
      51·
      3 months ago

      There is no big plan to weaken encryption or anything.

      This may not be a symptom of such a plan, but there very much is such a plan.

      Exportation of PGP and similar “strong encryption” in the 90s was considered as exporting munitions by the DoD.

      it was not until almost two decades later that the US began to move some of the most common encryption technologies off the Munitions List. Without these changes, it would have been virtually impossible to secure commercial transactions online, stifling the then-nascent internet economy.

      More recently you can take your pick.

      Governments DO NOT like people having encryption that isn’t backdoored. CSAM is literally the “but won’t someone think of the children” justification they use, and while the goals may be admirable in this case, the potential harm of succeeding in their quest to ban consumer-accessible strong encryption seems pretty obvious to me.

      As a bonus - anyone remember Truecrypt?

      https://cointelegraph.com/news/rhodium-enterprises-bitcoin-usd-loan-bankruptcy

      https://www.csoonline.com/article/547356/microsoft-subnet-encryption-canary-or-insecure-app-truecrypt-warning-says-use-microsoft-s-bitlocker.html