Durov has 'nothing to hide', says Telegram after France arrest • FRANCE 24 English

there are arguably more questions than answers at this stage as to the arrest of doov our Tech editor Julia seager's been looking into the story and she may be able to answer a few of those questions uh for us now Julia first of all do we know any more about his arrest no since the beginning of his custody we haven't had any information uh regarding the case uh it has indeed uh the the custody has been extended and it could last to up to 96 hours but that's usually what happens for terrorist suspects uh now what we know is that the arrest warrant was issued by what we call Offman here in France it's an agency that's dedicated to combat violence uh against minors and is part of a preliminary probe for many alleged uh uh offenses and they range from fraud drug trafficking cyber bullying organized crime to even the promotion of terrorism now of course he's not personally accused of it he's we're not saying that he personally uh participated in cyber bullying or uh drug trafficking but he's accused of not having done enough uh to stop the criminal use of telegram as asked also by the eu's digital markets act which is a law that was voted in by the EU recently but that said the uh the uh search warrant was issued here in France uh now so the first thing is that you know we're told that he didn't moderate the platform enough uh and one of the problems with telegram is that you have those groups that can accommodate up to 200,000 people these are huge communities and they're often singled out and accused of increasing the viral potential of certain content and the second thing he's accused of is not collaborating enough with investigators uh when we're told they were asked he was asked to do so now we're not told when he was asked to do so how many times he was asked to do so or in which case that does though fit with how doov describes himself because he sees himself as a Libertarian doesn't he that's right he's very much committed to security and confidentiality of uh the personal uh data of his users and also protecting freedom of speech now the entire model of telegram is based on this so the conversation are crypted endtoend this is a protocol that guarantees that the security of the communication so that means that uh telegram or other people no one can actually access uh the information when it's being sent now they've also chose transparency because the code is open source this means that anybody in the public can come and audit the line of code to see if perhaps there's been a back door that's been added to it and that's a choice a transparency choice that meta for instance hasn't made when you look at their economic model they don't uh resell or monetize the data and they're also known historically to not easily collaborate indeed with governments or uh with uh law enforcement twice they've done it before well several times actually they've done it before but it's only uh after several procedures now some other platforms tend to do it uh more readily for instance by giving IP addresses or email addresses now he said it several times loud and clear he won't answer to anybody he hasn't answered to the Kremlin when the Kremlin asked him to uh shut down certain accounts like Nani's account and he refused and that's also why he left uh Russia he won't receive orders from Paris or Washington either let me tell you that in an interview that he gave recently there aren't many of it of interviews out there but he gave an interview to uh Tucker Carlson and he explained that the FBI had approached him to try to poach one of his coders uh perhaps to create a back door of course that's an information we can't verify uh but it's not that surprising when we know also the history of C uh programs that were set up by American secret services using personal information uh including for instance the prisp program that was revealed by Edward Snowden and is it the way that telegram operates particularly that confidentiality the encryption you were talking about that makes the app so popular exactly it's exactly why people go to telegram is because they know that their uh their their their information is safe it's been downloaded by more than almost a billion active users today uh probably next year they'll reach that that uh that amount of of users uh but it's also why because it's so secure you're going to have criminals on the platform of course but you're also going to have heads of states and also groups of opponents in countries where there's a lot of censorship it's become extremely strategic especially in the conflict opposing Ukraine and Russia because Russian officials but also Ukrainian officials are using it so pretty much what you have today is the most all the most strategic Global conversations that are on telegram but with an encryption that is is incredible Julia Seager great to get your take on this thanks very much indeed