He's under arrest precisely because it is bad enough that Telegram is in a position to share data with law enforcement, but it chooses not to.

It's probably not enough for French authorities to know that some other country's equivalent is getting a copy of all messages and metadata when they want it themselves.

Even so, most messages sent on Telegram are plaintext, they're encrypted only in transport layer, but Telegram's servers see them in full. Secret chats (the only E2EE chats on Telegram) are hidden away from the users, hence the original link.

But that's why it's good. With all the mainstream media censoring stuff, telegram was a (good for the people) exception.

On the other hand, that's probably why they arrested him.

Your browser sends a clear message over an encrypted pipe, and the server on the other side, sees this clear message.

Telegram channels are public, unencrypted web shops for all kinds of illegal goods. I guess the French government alleges that Durov is not doing enough to stop these activities on his platform.

It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with encryption.

(At least at the moment, in most countries) it's not illegal to not ship a backdoor in your end-to-end-encrypted software upon government request, but in most it is illegal to not share data you're holding in a form accessible to you when you receive a warrant for it.

Doesn't mean that the server operators could. Think Mega (the new version of MegaUpload): they have these hash/fragment parts in the URL which aren't sent to the server and so you can send links around but Mega can claim they can't read anything because nobody gave them the "join" link to the data they host

But that's not what Telegram does and so they might reasonably have to implement automatic scans if there are an oddly high number of crimes being coordinated on the platform. (Sarcasm coming up:) It's really strange this would happen after they said it's for privacy nerds and then never implemented encryption for any of the useful/standard features

If you have access to some data, the government can require you to share it with them. But if you can't access the data due to encryption, the government can't force you to create a backdoor to access it. At least not outside truly extraordinary situations.

Personally I find Telegram kind of refreshing in nowadays internet landscape where everything is so sanitized. You can discover all kinds of niches you never knew existed.

Do you honestly think that any backdoor would be used for such mundane crimes? Even more so, it being in any way acknowledged that there might be a backdoor?

On that topic, it's highly likely Telegram is cooperating with Russian LE. Services and people that don't get thrown out quickly in Russia.

> The arrest cites that he was not cooperating with authorities to crack down on various drug illegal activities on telegram. [...] None of the other social networks have their ceos arrested.

Because if you want to operate in any country, you're either cooperating with the authorities or you'll get shut down or arrested. Hiding evidence you have is not tolerated anywhere.

and even eventually ended to become a major propaganda tool for the Russian army.

We had a nice scandal of sorts here in Denmark where a bunch of young men shared pictures of young women without consent. If you’re old enough to remember those old “rate this girl” web pages from the 90ies you’ll know what the pictures were used for. Basically it was a huge database on hot girls in Denmark and where they went to school. Today around 1000 young men have that on their permanent record as Facebook worked with law enforcement to catch the criminals. Telegram doesn’t do that. This was even a little more innocent that it may sound, considering the men were at least aged similar to the women they were sharing pictures of. Disgusting and illegal, but Telegram houses far worse and refuses to deal with it.

I know a lot of tech minded people are up in arms over this, but it’s really mainly about not wanting an unmoderated social network. Not because big brother is angry, but because people use it to organise bullying, share revenge porn, sell drugs and far, far, worse. There is also political factions within the EU who rants to kill encryption (though they were severely weakened when the brits left), but the anger against SoMe platforms is much more “European”. In that we (and I say this as the EU culture in general, not as in 100% of us) tend to view the people who enable bad behaviour as being participating in that behaviour. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube have been sort of protected by being early movers with mass adoption. Being American companies probably helps as well considering EU / US relations. Telegram never had such advantages, and is further disadvantaged by how its almost exclusively used for crime in Western Europe.

Obviously banning the platform won’t help. There will just be another platform. But then, we’ve also been losing a drug war for 50+ years even though we can’t even keep drugs out of our prisons.

I believe there was a public discussion on whether putting sharing of child pornography on a 15-19 year olds permanent record was the right thing to do in the context. Considering they are all similarly aged and are allowed to have sex and share nudes with consent. I can’t remember how it went, it wasn’t something I followed very closely.

“They practically detained the head of communication of the Russian army,”