Telegram CEO Arrested For Allowing Illegal Activity On His App

pav durov the Russian born entrepreneur and founder of telegram the hugely popular messaging app with over 900 million users was arrested in France with a large range of crimes being alleged but all essentially falling under his failure to prevent illicit activity on the app this is incredibly noteworthy as it is a very rare instance of authorities trying to hold a top executive accountable and personally liable for the behavior of its users on a tech platform Mr durov 39 years old was detained by the French authorities on Saturday after a flight from azerbijan he was charged on Wednesday with complicity in managing an online platform to enable legal transactions by an organized group which could lead to a sentence of up to 10 years in prison he was also charged with complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material drug trafficking and fraud and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement He was ordered to pay bail equal to about $5 million has to check in with the police twice a week and cannot leave France telegram has played a role in multiple criminal cases in France tied to child sexual abuse drug trafficking and online hate crimes but has shown a near total absence of response to requests for cooperation from law enforcement the Paris prosecutor said the case has turned up the heat on a long debate about Free Speech online and whether companies M themselves should be policing what their users say and do on their Tech platforms governments especially in the UA in the EU are putting increased uh pressure on these companies to do something about very important categories of course of child safety terrorism disinformation and other harmful content often running like wildfire on these platforms on these apps after the arrest the Dubai based company said that it follows all EU laws and that quote it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform Mr durov now joins a small list of high-ranking tech figures who have been indicted in connection with crimes committed by users of their services including Ross W Ock the creator of the Silk Road online black market and Chang Pang Zhao the founder of binance who pleaded guilty last year to US money laundering violations that took place on his cryptocurrency platform according to a New York Times article daany Keller professor of Internet law at Stanford law school said Mr durov and telegram were conspicuously different from other major platforms such as meta and Google which have a more robust uh have more robust safety and Trust teams that take down illegal content and respond to law enforcement requests quote I continue to assume the reason they can indict is because telegram forfeited their immunity by not taking down things they were notified about if that's true the indictment seems like a not surprising next step in Mr durov's Case telegram did not answer a request from the French authorities to identify one of his users in an investigation into child sexual abuse materials a person with knowledge of the matter said the article continued telegram which Mr dur founded in Russia in 2013 has more than 900 million users it works as a messaging app similar to Whatsapp or iMessage but also hosts groups with up to 200,000 users and has other channels with broadcasting features to help reach even larger audiences light oversight of content on the platform has helped people living under authoritarian governments on a positive side to communicate but has also made the app a Haven of harmful content durov has refused has infused rather telegram with an anti-authority ethos and commitment to free speech he said his worldview was informed by his experience in Russia and he came to believe strongly the government should put few restrictions on people's online speech and actions and that digital privacy trumped security saying quote private ultimately is more important than our fear of bad things happening he said in 2015 this could however also serve as precedent for authoritarian regimes to uh try to restrict Executives or try to imprison them even for Content or freedom of expression that they do not like so it's a really thorny issue it's a crazy precedent I'm curious you guys thought hey don't scroll away come back come back because before the video continues we just want to urge you to lend your support to tyt you power our honest reporting you do it at tyt.com team and we love you for it super hard issue so let me give you the Spectrum here so you see why it's so hard so if uh someone sneaks child porn onto a platform with whether it's Twitter telegram or whatever it is and you say well they did not take it down quickly enough efficiently enough Etc I'd say you're gonna arrest somebody over that no that's crazy they didn't put the child porn up and they don't want the child porn up on their platform yeah sometimes it's super hard to run a business in ela mus case when you fire two-thirds of your employees right and so uh and okay so that was a mistake or that was a thing that they didn't want and it's not like the founder of the company or the the CEO the company like was advocating for it or trying to make it no that's not if you arrest somebody over there that's nuts then you can't run any business online right because there's all guys and if you don't know this there's always people who are trying to put this kind of crazy material on every platform on different websites 24/7 there's like a whole industry of this so when you start anything online you have to like figure out how do I block the trolls Dragons monsters loot like dragons is a bad thing to use here because but anyway but like all these ghouls and goblins I mean from coming on now if you don't do that perfectly well and they arrest you for it I think that's nuts on the other hand if the platform knows oh there's a ring on here that's doing child porn uh money laundering uh a string of robberies a string of rapes child rape oh my God and you've got a evidence and a warrant and a country comes and says we know there is illegal activity going and somebody's going to get harm somebody's being harmed right now and they go whatever I'm not going to do anything about it okay well that's a different issue you you see the range of possibilities here and so when you get to issues in the middle it gets really hard and there's one other complexity here and I'm going to give you an curious analogy here but I I think you'll see why I'm doing this uh so I'm watching Suits with my uh kids and I'm explaining a lot of them as we go along it's a fun show but it's heavy on legal ease right and I happen to go to law school and I'm a lawyer Etc and so I can at least explain the basics I did uh and so uh what I explain to them is lawyers have a responsibility to their clients and that responsibility is so sacred in that profession that in that context we put different burdens and responsibilities on them than we would an average person so if you know your client did something wrong there's a range of things there if you know they're about to commit a crime you still have to turn them in right but if you know they did something wrong in the past a normal person would have to turn them in but their lawyer can't and shouldn't it's a different moral code for a good reason which is we need you to advocate for your client in this system system unreservedly right and we're superseding other moral factors we care about to make that possible so when you're running a platform like this there's a really interesting uh argument to have over is privacy on these platforms so important like serving your client is if you're a lawyer that it supersedes other moral factors involved again I don't have that answer because it's a super hard answer but it's one that we're going to have to decide as a society here so how this applies to this particular guy depends on the details of the case and right now we don't know the details well enough are they on the end of the spectrum where they're like ah there's bad things on there let's just arrest the guy crazy I would be 100% against that or is it on the side here where they go no no we have evidence of lawbreaking happening right now we're trying to stop it and they won't let us and we'll get a few more details in a sec but I'm curious to hear W's thoughts before we get to a little bit more of the nuance this this is a really interesting case as as Jen just mentioned there's a couple of things one telegram has gone out of their way and I think quite a little dishonestly as marketing themselves to the people who use the app as the most encrypted or private of all of them and it's just not true um in terms of what is the most privacy forward of the messaging apps uh you can take for example I message uh where you know you can only do about 32 people at a time on group message and there's a reason for that cuz Apple's just like we're encrypting end to end every single message when the feds come to us our stuff is so encrypted we literally can't even go in there and tell you um what people are texting to each other however the FBI has figured out how to um hijack iPhone so it's a moot point right like when the feds want to get into a phone they can so it kind of doesn't really matter uh WhatsApp can have up to 1,000 people uh in a group chat and it's also end to end encrypted but it's only 1,000 how telegram um got popular because they do have these 200,000 people chats and they also have what's called like these channels where as many people as they want can kind of subscribe and get a news feed or almost like a Blog from these telegram people but telegram again is the most loosely encrypted meaning all of the information that happens on telegram is happening on a server that they can go in and look at and so the idea that the French authorities are coming to these guys like bro we found the freaking you know uh pedophiles and money Smugglers and all of these people this is what they're doing we want the freaking information we know you can you have access to it and give it to us and they're just like nah can't help you it's insane and lastly what I will say about you know Facebook Instagram WhatsApp all of these people trust me in America they play ball with our government law enforcement agencies period yeah I mean they often do sometimes they say no to that but you know these things always have you know pros and cons because people use it for elicit activities for sure but I'm also in a few telegram groups that keep me up to date on things breaking on the ground in the Israel Hamas War I mean group that talks about atrocities and difficult things happening to Israelis that group's got like 20,000 people and I'm in a group called Gaza now in English that talks about horrible things happening to the gazen people that has 200 almost 200,000 people and there's another group that I can't read but it's Gaza now in in Arabic and it's got 2 million people they're broadcasting out constantly those are not encrypted so also they can just they can just get that information themselves by joining those groups I was able to join with no problem but it does bring up the details of encryption and makes encryption really put on the spotlight here French authorities said telegram had provided cryptology Services aimed at ensuring confidentiality without a license encryption has been a long running point of friction between governments and tech companies around the world for years tech companies have argued that encrypted messaging is crucial to maintain people's digital privacy while law enforcement and governments have said that the technology enables illicit behaviors by hiding illegal activity US tech companies including some of the ones that was mentioned signal apple and meta WhatsApp all give their users endtoend encryption these apps are encrypted by default as well which means users conversations are immediately private the moment they start chatting whereas telegram handles encryption differently actually and is a lot less encrypted you have to opt in Via pretty hard to find setting and is only offered again for the one-on-one communication not for large groups the debate has grown more heated as encrypted messaging apps have become mainstream signal has grown by tens of millions of users since its founding in 2018 Apple's iMessages installed on the hundreds of millions of iPhones the tech company sells each year WhatsApp is used by more than two billion people globally but one of the examples when they didn't turn it over in 2020 Apple pushed back against an FBI request for example that the company break its encryption in order to access data on two iPhones that belonged to a gunman who opened fire at a naval base in Florida I think even know until researching the story that Apple's iMessage is encrypted end to end I did not know that I it takes away a lot of the reason to even use some of these other apps but to my mind if something genuinely is encrypted end to end in a world where privacy has disappeared and it becomes very hard to have truly private conversations and there are times when you have to rise up against a government or against an invading Force like we've you know like I just mentioned with some of these other groups that I'm part of if they're truly end to-end encrypted the company can't get into that communication I don't think they should be asked to there has to be other ways to investigate those crimes that's my thought yeah so I Devil's in the details so this is a trial I probably follow very closely to see what exact evidence they have is it a crime they know is happening is it imminent can it be stopped uh and you know how are they holding the the founder of the company accountable for that is it someone else to hold accountable so I I just I think it's super interesting but I worried on both sides uh I'm a little worried that if they can't if they've found a way to to create a safe haven for significant criminal activity that we're all worried about that's a problem and on the other hand if they basically block us from having any private conversations I'm massively worried about that and then saying oh yeah if you create a safe space for anyone online to have any private conversation you're going to get arrested that's a giant problem and that's big brother Etc so this case could be deeply problematic or it could be logical depending on the details and so I think a lot of the world's going to be watching this case this is not a little thing this is a giant giant issue for the whole planet yeah and just a couple of things um for people to understand at home like this concept of freedom of speech that's a very American thing that's all right um that's why like you know a lot of times companies can go to Court based on that right like it's literally codified um here in our laws here that's not the case in a place like France and England there's no First Amendment up there and so um this is just a different uh animal altogether over there CU like this telegram guy can say I believe in the principles of freedom of speech and these other governments can be like we don't care you don't get to operate here um under that principle and the second thing that I will say cuz I think all of us here um on the show today are pretty staunch Free Speech Advocates I think when PE when when the framers um invented this amendment like you know they're thinking about some wacko on the corner yelling at the you know howling at the moon right like of course he should have the freedom to do that I don't think they can conceive of a of an internet where like theoretically from your phone like theoretically you can reach the entire planet you know uh it's just a different way of viewing these principles that we hold so dear yeah one super last thing that was and Ben both kind of alluded to that I want to make clear remember there's different laws in different countries so if a country goes well in this country it's illegal to criticize the leader of the country and you allowed a an your app to have private conversations where they were criticizing the leader of this country that's illegal you're under arrest that's a huge problem right and how do we solve that problem um of course one ways don't go to that country right yeah just stay out of Saudi Arabia that's you the problem Jake and the implications here are exactly that because Elon Musk obviously does not want this to be happening and not want to be held accountable he immediately tweeted out on X free pavl because he doesn't want this happening but on the same token it also doesn't make a ton of sense to hold some of these platforms accountable when like why is it different than a telephone once you have like conference calling because somebody plans a drug deal on a four-way phone call is AT&T responsible it should stop the 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