Telegram Founder Arrested by Authorities in France

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the messaging app Telegram has been arrested by French authorities on Saturday evening. He faces the potential of up to 20 years in prison. The claim is that Telegram has a lack of moderation and therefore has been an accomplice to drug trafficking, fraud, conspiracy, money laundering and more. How a messaging app can both remain private and provide moderation remains a mystery.

A Brief History Of Pavel Durov

Pavel was born in the then-Soviet Union in 1984, which he and his family left when he was aged 5. They lived in Italy for some years before returning to Russia after his father received a job at St Petersburg University, that Pavel would eventually attend for education.

In 2006, he co-founded the social media website, VK, a Russian alternative to Facebook. During this time, he was pressured by the Kremlin to shut down Putin opposition on the platform, which he refused with a good amount of online trolling.

On April 1st, 2014, Durov submitted his resignation as CEO of VK, claiming it was due to this pressure from Russian agencies and authorities. However, he said that this was an April Fool's joke just a couple of days later. Strangely, he was later dismissed as CEO of VK a few weeks after that, with the company referring to his previous resignation that he had failed to recall. Durov suggested that the company had been taken over by Putin's allies, due to his refusal to give up personal user data. He left Russia, to focus on his new company, Telegram.

Telegram

Pavel and his brother Nikolai founded Telegram in 2013. The emphasis of the app was to preserve security and privacy, providing end-to-end encryption for private chats. After leaving Russia, Pavel obtained citizenship from Saint Kitts and Nevis (a small Caribbean island) and based the company out of Germany. A few years later, he would leave Europe again, to UAE, saying that he couldn't hire the people he wanted while in Europe due to strict immigration policies.

Since 2022, Telegram has become an unfiltered source of information about the war in Ukraine, with both Russian and Ukrainian citizens and people in positions of power using it to share content - some of which is graphic or misleading. This has caused further pressure coming from Russia to the company to share private data, with it's foreign ministry sending a note to Paris demanding access to Durov.

Pavel Durov appears to be fiercely libertarian, which he expresses through the applications that he builds, and his actions in obtaining multiple citizenships in order to become somewhat of a nomad or sovereign individual. He believed that obtaining these multiple citizenships would grant him freedom and protect him from authorities, which is only partly true. While multiple citizenships does afford some freedom in terms of ease of travel, lengths of stay as well as tax benefits, ultimately it would be his downfall. Holding multiple citizenships does come with associated risks and difficulties, especially when running a company like Telegram; for instance having to abide by and navigate the laws of multiple jurisdictions, asset seizure, extradition risk as well as increased government surveillance and monitoring, since the act of holding multiple citizenships will mark an individual as suspicious.

Privacy Concerns

Over the years, Telegram has gained a lot of popularity and as such has received pressure from governments across the world and other competing messaging platforms.

The ways in which Durov has been able to obtain 3 different citizenships, while continuing to hold his Russian citizenship has also been speculated on, with claims that he received them (in particular his French one), by allowing authorities a backdoor into Telegram. Indeed, there are several suspicious elements to his application and obtaining of his French citizenship. His name was changed as to "Frenchify" it on his application, which he said was a joke that he forgot about, only to have the application suddenly approved shortly later. Without living in a French-speaking country, to expedite and approve a citizenship application would generally require offering some kind of special assistance or service to the government. His Saint Kitts citizenship was obtained through a donation of $250,000 to the country's Sugar Industry Diversification Foundation. There is further suspicion that his UAE citizenship came at the cost of a backdoor to the government, as the country is known to be heavy on surveillance and monitoring.

In 2018, Telegram created a shitcoin called TON, initially intended to be a contender to Ethereum, using the proof of stake consensus mechanism. In 2020, Telegram abandoned the project due to regulatory pressure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) who sued Telegram over the coin, alleging that it was an unregistered security. Since the arrest, the TON price has crashed around 20%.

While the company itself asserts it's adherence to it's ethos of privacy, there remains much speculation as to how private and secure the application itself actually is.

The Telegram application still has several potential points of failure, such as it's use of centralized servers. Moreover, the code is not open source and cannot be verified. Privacy is also available only through the secret chats feature, and regular chats outside of that are not end-to-end encrypted. This current event shows us how applications built within a traditional company structure also expose human points of failure as CEOs and executives within the company are known entities that can be taken down by authorities for any reason that is seen fit.

Why is this Important?

This news follows a string of arrests throughout recent history of founders and developers around the world building tools and platforms that facilitate illegal activity. The philosophical debate is whether or not these builders should be held responsible for how users choose to use their platform. Decentralized applications built on protocols like Bitcoin and Nostr further complicate this question from a responsibility viewpoint. Pavel has also revealed in an interview with Tucker Carlson just before his arrest that Telegram engineers have been approached by US agencies to introduce backdoors into the application. It is widely speculated that the same requests have been made by other countries.

In 2013, Ross Ulbricht (also known by the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts"), was arrested and ultimately imprisoned by US authorities for multiple similar charges, including money laundering, conspiracy to commit computer hacking and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. Ulbricht founded and ran The Silk Road, an online black market that operated on the Dark Web from 2011. An argument has persisted since then about Ulbricht's imprisonment, especially amongst libertarians and Bitcoiners (which was the main currency of The Silk Road during it's operations), with Donald Trump promising at the 2024 Bitcoin Conference that he would free Ross on day one of his presidency if he is to win the election.

More recently, the cryptocurrency space has seen multiple arrests of founders and developers who have built privacy-focus applications on top of the Bitcoin network. In April, the founders of the Bitcoin privacy wallet Samourai were arrested on charges of money laundering. In May, Tornado Cash developer Alexey Pertsev was sentenced to 64 months in prison on the same charge.

In response to Durov's arrest, Chris Pavlokski, founder and CEO of YouTube alternative Rumble — which bills itself as being immune to ‘cancel culture' — announced on X that he has ‘departed from Europe' stating that France has ‘threatened' Rumble.

This string of events raises significant ethical and philosophical questions around our ability to communicate freely. The debate continues; meanwhile it is arguable that this arrest is just another attack in an increasingly authoritarian and less private world against our freedom, leading us in a dangerous direction where the ability to communicate and transact with whoever we please without oppressive surveillance appears to be at risk.

There are some alternative private messaging applications that are worth exploring:

• Signal: end-to-end encryption for text, voice and video and open source, with no ads or tracking. You can use signal without having to share any private information like a phone number.
• WhatsApp: end-to-end encryption for text, voice and video, however not open-source and has received criticism for it's data sharing practices. It is also owned by Meta/Facebook. Proceed with caution.
• Wire: end-to-end encryption for text, voice and video and open source. As with Signal, you can use it without providing a phone number.

When using any application, it is important to do some due diligence on the app itself as well as the company. Be careful what you share online, even where the words "private" and "secure" are used. Always remember; don't trust, verify.