Russian born billionaire Pavel Durov founder of Telegram arrested in Paris for failure to curb criminal use of the platform

[Kurve]

Durov is expected to appear before a judge on Sunday on charges connected to terrorism, narcotics, complicity, fraud, money laundering, receiving stolen goods and child pornography, according to TF1.

“On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of offences and crimes to be committed, for which he did nothing to moderate or co-operate, ” the source added.

The French had a warrant for Durov that could only be executed in France. It appears Durov made a blunder by landing his private jet in Paris where he was swooped on and arrested.

Law enforcement believes that Telegram’s lack of moderation and the tools it offers, such as cryptocurrencies, make it complicit in global drug trafficking, pedophilia and fraud. But the search warrant was only valid if Durov stepped foot on French soil.

A Russian-born tech entrepreneur, Durov is best known for founding the social networking site VK (VKontakte) and the messaging app Telegram.

Durov founded Telegram in 2013 with his brother Nikolai, but fled Russia in 2014 after he refused to hand over encrypted user data to Russian officials.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/telegram-founder-pavel-durov-arrested-at-paris-airport-report/news-story/49e58d0fc2c18b1fcf0dd02d44906677

 

[MSB ROYS]

The owners of platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, X, TikTok etc don't seem to really care that people are selling stolen goods, bombarding people with scam ads, underage grooming, p0rn to minors etc on their platforms.

(Hopefully France has arrest warrants for them as well LoL).

 

[Ballarat Bob]

Russian government and military use it extensively and are already telling everyone to delete their history and messages.
The Russians also want access to Durov in detention I presume to tell him that some family members might be falling out of windows if he cooperates with the French.

 

[Kurve]

Durov appears to be quite cautious about where he travels. How did he end up France, where there was a warrant waiting for him?

 

[MSB ROYS]

Kurve Agree, seems a bit suspicious. Both him and his brother are extremely intelligent and this doesn't seem like a mistake they would make willingly.

 

[Kurve]

Kurve Agree, seems a bit suspicious. Both him and his brother are extremely intelligent and this doesn't seem like a mistake they would make willingly.

Durov says in his interview, that he's very careful about where he travels and will only go to places where he's confident those places are consistent with Telegram's values. From about 44.00 in the Carlson interview.

 

[MSB ROYS]

I wonder if there was mechanical or fuel issues. Perhaps the pilot was in on it or maybe it was an enormous oversight.

 

[Kurve]

I wonder if there was mechanical or fuel issues. Perhaps the pilot was in on it or maybe it was an enormous oversight.

Pretty big oversight, he flew from Azerbaijan to France which is a really long flight.

 

[BFew]

The current French Government has been under sustained attack from those trying to get a nationalist government installed, and NATO and the EU weakened, or disbanded (like US team Steve Bannon), and Russia.

Telegram has being used for communications to organise rioting in the UK recently.

I suspect that the French Government, primarily wants to try and get access to all currently encrypted social media like communications in real time to attempt to prevent likewise happening there as much as possible.

Particularly with the current precarious state of politics there after recent elections.

Chaos in France after Macron refuses to name prime minister from leftwing coalition

More talks to take place on Tuesday as president attempts to find a PM who can command cross-party support

www.theguardian.com

 

[Ballarat Bob]

He only travels to countries with telegram values ? I couldn't see Dubai being too impressed with him if there was any dissent on telegram about the rulers of UAE.
He's gone straight from Azerbaijan to Paris ? No stopping off in Dubai on the way through via his home ?
Really hard to tell if he was just arrogant and didn't think the French authorities would pick him up out of the transit lounge as he hasn't passed through immigration. Or he's genuinely been spooked when he was in Azerbaijan and has picked out France as a safe haven.

 

[BFew]

Or he's genuinely been spooked when he was in Azerbaijan and has picked out France as a safe haven.

France will probably be nice and safe for him if he gives them the backdoor to Telegram.

France can then use this as possible leverage or a bargaining chip with some of their allies, frenemies and enemies.

Team Macron might find it useful to gather any dirt on Team Le Pen and her further to the extreme crazy allies.

 

[BFew]

The below article today is archived at https://archive.is/xprP7

Telegram founder's arrest is radical — if it's a crime to build privacy tools, there will be no privacy

Pavel Durov's arrest suggests that the law enforcement dragnet is being widened from private financial transactions to private speech.

www.crikey.com.au

'Wired magazine has documented how the Russian government has been able to track users down for their apparently private Telegram conversations. For that matter, it would not be surprising to learn that there are complex geopolitical games going on here between France and Russia.'

This article is very very long. Well worth reading on the whole thing.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-kremlin-has-entered-the-chat/ (archived at https://archive.is/M5zw4)

'The Kremlin Has Entered the Chat​

Russian antiwar activists placed their faith in Telegram, a supposedly secure messaging app. How does Putin’s regime seem to know their every move?

Updated 4/27/2023 3:00 pm: This story has been updated with additional comments provided by Telegram.
....
“Do you know how we knew you were home?”

“How?”

He told her that the FSB has equipment that can pinpoint a phone’s location to within one meter, which didn’t surprise her—Russia’s state-owned telecoms often cooperate with security forces, allowing them to track Russian SIM cards. Then the officer said something that left her stunned.

“There you were, sitting there, writing to your friends in the chat room,” she recalls him saying. He proceeded to dispassionately quote word for word several Telegram messages she had written from her bed. “‘They’re unlikely to bust it down,’” he recited.

“And so,” he said, “we knew that you were there.”

Matsapulina was speechless. She tried to hide her shock, hoping to learn more about how they’d accessed her messages. But the officer didn’t elaborate.

When she was released two days later, Matsapulina learned from her lawyer that on the morning she was arrested, police had searched the houses of some 80 other people with opposition ties and had arrested 20, charging each with terrorism related to the alleged bomb threat.

two conceivable explanations for how the officers had read her private Telegram messages. One was that they had installed some kind of malware, like the NSO Group’s infamous Pegasus tool, on her phone. Based on what she’d gathered, the expensive software was reserved for high-level targets and was not likely to have been turned on a mid-level figure in an unregistered party with about 1,000 members nationwide.

The other “unpleasant” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.

Telegram would later posit a third possible explanation: That in the few hours after Matsapulina’s arrest and before she was questioned, FSB officers had extracted her messages using a phone-hacking tool like Cellebrite.
...
Over the past year, numerous dissidents across Russia have found their Telegram accounts seemingly monitored or compromised. Hundreds have had their Telegram activity wielded against them in criminal cases. Perhaps most disturbingly, some activists have found their “secret chats”—Telegram’s purportedly ironclad, end-to-end encrypted feature—behaving strangely, in ways that suggest an unwelcome third party might be eavesdropping.
...
On February 24, Moxie Marlinspike, the cofounder of Telegram’s US rival Signal, posted on Twitter, “Telegram is the most popular messenger in urban Ukraine. After a decade of misleading marketing and press, most people there believe it’s an ‘encrypted app.’ The reality is the opposite.” Aside from “secret chats,” Telegram’s messages are accessible to people inside the company. “Every msg, photo, video, doc sent/received for the past 10 yrs; all contacts, group memberships, etc are all available to anyone w/ access to that database,” Marlinspike tweeted.

Elies Campo, who says he directed Telegram’s growth, business, and partnerships for several years, confirmed this general characterization to WIRED, as did a former Telegram developer. In other words, Telegram has the capacity to share nearly any confidential information a government requests. Users just have to trust that it won’t.
...
Russian authorities may not even need Telegram’s cooperation to monitor users at scale. That’s because Telegram has effectively built that capability into its generous application programming interface.
...
“absolutely no doubt” the Kremlin is exploiting Telegram’s API at scale.
...
the Kremlin is also working with Russian tech firms like SeusLab, which processes a billion social networking pages and instant messaging chats a day, to produce detailed profiles of users based on their “political activity.”
...
A burgeoning pro-war open source intelligence community has also built an army of bots on Telegram to search for users via username and see which public groups they’re in and which channels they follow, making them easier to identify. According to Ksenia Ermoshina, a researcher at Citizen Lab and the Center for Internet and Society, people who know how to navigate the system can sometimes get a fairly detailed portrait of a user’s public activities just by entering their Telegram ID, “which is quite scary.”
...
When Telegram emerged as one of the last remaining oases of information and discussion for Russians, it also became a kind of funnel for Kremlin agents. Agora’s Seleznev believes that Telegram’s API allows investigators to monitor public groups at a large scale and then zero in on potential suspects, who can subsequently be pursued into private channels by undercover agents—or perhaps via a court order to Telegram.
...
police infiltration of Telegram is widespread. In neighboring Belarus, security services work from a manual that describes “tools and methods” for “deanonymizing” users on Telegram, including tips for infiltrating groups. Ermoshina suspects that much the same is happening in Russia, judging from the uptick in criminal cases that cite a suspect’s Telegram activity
...'

 

[Kurve]

The other “unpleasant” explanation, she wrote, “is, I think, obvious to everyone.” Russians needed to consider the possibility that Telegram, the supposedly antiauthoritarian app cofounded by the mercurial Saint Petersburg native Pavel Durov, was now complying with the Kremlin’s legal requests.

Yep.

Might be bye byes for Telegram.

 

[Kurve]

Durov is also a citizen of France.

He's been bailed on $8.2million, not allowed to leave the country and has to report in twice a week.

Telegram boss facing preliminary charges in France after arrest

The tech billionaire is barred from leaving France while investigations into child abuse material and drug trafficking on the platform continue.

www.abc.net.au

 

[BFew]

Not sure anyone is going to be believe anything coming from any K mouthpiece.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-it-made-no-deals-with-telegrams-durov-2024-08-30/

'Kremlin says it made no deals with Telegram's Durov'​

'August 30, 2024
...
The Kremlin has never made any deals with Telegram boss Pavel Durov, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Friday, adding that he was not aware of any meetings between the tech entrepreneur and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
...
"There were no negotiations between Durov and the Kremlin," Peskov told reporters. "And the fact that he visited Russia, well, he is a Russian citizen, he moves freely, so naturally he visited Russia.

"There were no deals between the Kremlin and Durov," Peskov said in response to further questions.
...
Peskov said that as far as he was aware, Putin and Durov had never met.
...
The case has plunged Franco-Russian relations to new lows, according to Moscow, where some pro-Kremlin figures have accused Washington of being behind the detention of Durov, something Paris has denied.
...'

 

[BFew]

Maybe a template for other countries to use for temp or permanent banning of X, or other social media platforms, like Telegram or Signal at some point in the not too distant future.

The order including all service providers to block VPN applications being used to access X is interesting.

Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it missed deadline

Social media platform to be blocked by ISPs because it did not appoint legal representative in allotted time

www.theguardian.com

'The Brazilian supreme court has ordered that X be suspended in the country after the social media platform failed to meet a deadline to appoint a legal representative in the country.'

Late on Friday afternoon, Justice Alexandre de Moraes – who has been engaged in a dispute with X’s owner, Elon Musk, since April – ordered the “immediate, complete and total suspension of X’s operations” in the country, “until all court orders … are complied with, fines are duly paid, and a new legal representative for the company is appointed in the country”.

He gave Brazil’s National Telecommunications Agency 24 hours to enforce the decision. Once notified, the agency must pass the order on to the more than 20,000 broadband internet providers in the country, each of which must block X.

Justice Moraes also initially summoned Apple and Google to “implement technological barriers to prevent the use of the X app by users of the iOS and Android systems” and to block the use of virtual private network (VPN) applications.

However, later in the evening, the judge removed the part mentioning Apple and Google “until there is a statement from the parties [X and Musk] in the case, to avoid any potential unnecessary disruptions to third-party companies [Apple and Google]”.

The decision imposes a daily fine of R$50,000 (£6,800) on individuals and companies that attempt to continue using X via VPN.
...'