Telegram CEO Arrest Is Just the Beginning

Telegram is a hugely popular communications app that enables person-to-person communication as well as groups and announcements. I have used it for years, both to announce my works (videos and essays) and to allow friends of my work to chat and share news with one another in real-time. It’s a platform that comes under frequent scrutiny for not engaging in censorship, thus inflaming a variety of governments and news outlets.

Now, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has been arrested in France. The claim is not that he has said or done anything himself, but that he supplied the communication medium for those who did. It’s just as preposterous as it would be to charge the CEO of UPS or Fedex because a criminal used their services to mail something illegal (which has surely happened).

Historically, it has been understood that tech companies are third parties to what people say on their platforms. This is because it would be impossible for any such company to keep up with the flurry of copyright violations, libel, and outright criminal activity that occurs every hour. They’re not publishers in the same way that a newspaper is—carefully curating and editing all of the material that is printed. The sheer scale of the material that passes through their systems is unprecedented when compared to any purely offline endeavor.

In the United States, this third-party status is codified, offering such companies legal protection. Elsewhere, it was merely acknowledged as self-evident, then occasionally such companies were threatened with legal action if they didn’t do what a government wanted in regard to a user of their platforms.

Paris police arrested him shortly after he landed in France, as a visitor, for he lives in Dubai. The charges against Pavel Durov can be separated into the following categories:

• Complicity in Web-Mastering for Illegal Transactions: This broad charge alleges that he was complicit in illegal transactions by merely running Telegram. If he were found guilty, it would set a terrifying standard for technology companies.

• Refusal to Communicate Information for Lawful Interceptions: He failed to comply with government requests for user data.

• Complicity in Narcotics and Child Abuse Activities: This alleges that Telegram was used to facilitate child abuse and drug trafficking, and that he is therefore guilty too, despite his lack of involvement in those activities.

• Offering Tools for Cybersecurity Breaches: Telegram is used to distribute all kinds of communications and files, and this charge accuses him of offering, selling, or making available tools that could be used to access or damage data systems, such as malware scripts.

• Financial Crimes: It is alleged that he is guilty of receiving the proceeds derived from organized crime, because of the behavior done through the service.

• Regulatory Non-Compliance in Cryptology: Several of the charges are related to the provision of cryptography services without proper declarations, suggesting a desire by the French government to prevent fully private communications.

The charges that relate to cryptology speak to the French government’s frustration at Telegram’s use of encryption, which it does to protect user privacy. Elon Musk has stated that he believes Durov to have been targeted for refusing to give governments the keys to his encrypted app.

This is one area in which the USA has been distinct from the rest of the world. In the USA, there are far more protections for basic speech, even though some are pushing for “hate speech” regulations. The countries of Europe are getting much more aggressive against speech, especially England, France, and Germany. However, the USA was never supposed to be a mere copycat of Europe.

In 1790, Noah Webster penned the essay, On the Education of Youth in America, in which he asserted, “Americans must believe and act from the belief that it is dishonorable to waste life in mimicking the follies of other nations and basking in the sunshine of foreign glory.” He feared that those in the educational system would glorify a corrupt European culture, teaching the next generation to bring about what their parents had toiled to liberate themselves from. We see this glorification of Europe in many of our institutions, especially academia.

In an age like ours, where people get most (or all) of their news from the Internet, and seldom engage with their neighbors, it’s becoming easy for governments and mega-corporations to use censorship to keep people ignorant. The average age of those who watch the Big Three news channels is 69. Nobody can have illusions that the medium is going to appeal to younger generations. That means that those who want to control information in the future will move to control the Internet aggressively.

Perhaps most concerning is the rumor that Apple will remove Telegram from its App Store. Apple’s operating system, IOS, is one of only two main options on the market (the other being Android). That gives Google and Apple tremendous power over information delivery. Apple has a history of prohibiting other apps for a lack of censorship, such as it did with Gab, and has been accused by major tech firms like Spotify of “extortion” for its excessive fees in a monopoly environment.

Tucker Carlson recently said that the Biden Administration has encouraged France’s Macron to make the arrest, but there is limited information about that accusation available.

The battles that are now being fought over information delivery and private communication are easy for most people to dismiss as the domain of ‘Internet nerds’. However, the means of available free communication has a huge impact on how informed people are, how they can fight against authoritarianism, and how small groups can organize and assist each other. The worst tyrannies have always prioritized the control of information and communication, so these freedoms must be aggressively defended. Given the decline of the culture at large and the slide of the governments of the West, along with the increased persecution of Christians, it is prudent to work to defend the means that people can protect one another and communicate freely.