https://www.rt.com/news/603033-telegram-founder-paris-arrest/
The founder has been arrested in Paris on charges of abetting criminals by making a censorship resistant app. He in the past claimed the west (NSA/CIA/etc) asked him to put a backdoor in his app and for what little it’s worth he claims he refused.
Now with him in their custody, in their clutches, where they can sentence him to a brutal prison sentence for the rest of his life he may like many people be willing to cut them a deal on a backdoor so he can save his own life. Such a deal may not be publicly apparent and may even be carefully disguised and hidden behind a public legal drama that is fiction.
I don’t think any immediate emergency action is warranted but I would encourage those using it to evaluate what this means for their continued usage and the threat it presents to them say 6 months from now.
We have to wait and see, he could be cleared and leave quickly, he could face a trial which may or may not say anything about him allowing western intelligence to compromise it. As they could try and hide the fact he cut a deal behind a public apparent defeat by his lawyers if they want to keep it under wraps to better utilize such access against Russians for example who are heavy, heavy users of the app and it could present a trove of intelligence to say nothing of abilities to compromise top Russian officials were they to get in bed with the eyes agreement agencies.
Point is they snatched him at the airport when he landed and it can’t be anything but politically motivated.
At the very least I expect them to force him to submit to public censorship of “disinformation” which means the Russian perspective. Oh they’ll bust a few pedophiles and drug rings as well but it’s mainly about controlling yet another app that’s available in the west and sticking a knife in Russia’s back.
Here’s something interesting from Ars:
As Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, noted tonight, “A popular Russian channel says that Telegram is also used by Russian forces to communicate, and that if Western intelligence services gain access to it, they could obtain sensitive information about the Russian military.” https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/shocker-french-make-surprise-arrest-of-telegram-founder-at-paris-airport/
This once again shows the need for tech sovereignty among anti-imperialist nations. It’s not enough to use something that’s not directly controlled by the enemy because the enemy will find ways to pressure, blackmail, coerce those third parties into doing their bidding anyways. It’s important for these countries to have platforms safely headquartered within one of these other friend nations that are resistant to just one person being arrested, where even someone with extraordinary access wouldn’t be a threat because of security service involvement.
Given the detention in France I think the broader context of encryption policy in the EU is relevant as well.
The EU parliament has had multiple draft laws proposed over the past few years that intend to break private communication for everyday citizens. The proposals are varied, from the inclusion of backdoors to a requirement that service providers scan all messages for “CSM” (I put this in quotes because the content they actually want to track has nothing to do with minors and everything to do with class power). IIRC the current proposal is to just break SSL entirely by forcing browsers to accept certificates issued by the EU itself.
With seemingly random “terror” attacks occurring within the EU recently I can imagine that this will once again be used as the causus belli to go after private messaging and working class access to encryption. The politically motivated detention of the founder of Telegram is almost certainly part of the broader strategy to be able to surveil the thoughts of European citizens, residents, and guests. It’s also worth noting that the founder of Telegram was already detained by some US alphabet agencies (FBI maybe?) years ago.