well in other news the French President Emanuel macron says there's no political motive behind the arrest of the billionaire boss of the telegram online messaging service pavl jurov was held when he landed on a private jet at an airport outside Paris the telegram founder is accused of turning a blind eye to criminals using the platform and for failing to disclose details to authorities I'd like to welcome Eva galperin is the director of cyber security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation which focuses on digital rights she joins me from San Francisco welcome to you Eva what do you make of Emanuel macron saying there was no political motive in the arrest of jov well uh I am not sure I put a lot of uh faith in uh how macron characterizes this arrest because right now there's simply a whole lot that we don't know uh right now all we know is that dof has been arrested and there is a press release from the prosecutor's office that outlines a number of charges that are not necessarily against him and that don't site you know specific laws that have been broken or uh specific details about things that are happening on telegram so a lot of it is really just speculation right now I'd like to ask you a little bit more about that because according to prosecutors durov's arrest was partly over suspicion of providing cryptographic services to criminals you've tweeted that some of this is a big red flag could you explain what you meant by that sure um I was referring to the LA the description of the last three charges in uh in the press release uh which are not descriptions of cryptographic services that he was allegedly providing to criminals but rather of a uh a failure to engage in uh essentially some bureaucratic hoop jumping having to do with uh providing uh cryptographic Services we think that this is probably in reference to the end to-end encryption one-on-one secret chat capability that telegram has which is actually just a very small subset of the communications on telegram but again the uh the press release is entirely unclear uh you know what the arrest is about and and what this has to do with anything uh the three charges that I'm particularly concerned about have to do with a failure to have essentially gotten in front of a judge and made an official declaration having to do with uh some sort of cryptographic tool thus you know proving that the cryptography does what they say it does uh and also with having failed to uh prior uh to register uh these tools in in some way that is familiar to most makers of uh cryptographic tools that uh make themselves available inside of France okay if we um sort of look a bit more broadly at this this does seem to be a situation where a government is trying to hold a provider of a web service liable for the actions of its users I'm just wondering do you agree with that and and do you think this is an attack on free speech like Elon Musk says or a genuine attempt to to tackle criminal activity it depends we don't even know what the activity is uh no one has pointed to a specific activity they have described classes of activity they have alleged all kinds of of criminal activity but no one has point Ed to anything yet uh one of the reasons why I am uh really skeptical whenever a government says uh you know that a platform is simply failing to go after criminals is that governments have very different ideas about who does and does not qualify as a criminal if for example uh you are president erdogan of uh of turkey you may describe your political enemies as uh as criminals and uh telegram failing to uh censor are your political enemies as aiding and abetting uh terrorism so I'm very skeptical and I would have to see the actual examples before I can really have any kind of opinion okay thank you very much for your time there Eva that was Eva galper and director of cyber security at the Electronic Frontier Foundation uh speaking to us from San Francisco thank you thank you