Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France

https://lemmy.world/post/19014895

Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France - Lemmy.World

Pavel Valeryevich Durov

(Russian: Павел Валерьевич Дуров; born 10 October 1984)[4] is a Russian-born Emirati entrepreneur who is known for founding the social networking site VK and the app Telegram Messenger. He is the younger brother of Nikolai Durov. As of 29 September 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$15.1 billion. In 2022, he was recognized as the richest expat in the United Arab Emirates, according to Forbes. In February 2023, Arabian Business named him the most powerful entrepreneur in Dubai.

What a fucking horseshit excuse for law enforcement.

Encrypted communication should be a human right.

What has encryption got to do with it?

Most of telegram is not encrypted. There are unencrypted channels on telegram right now hosting child pornography. Telegram never removes them.

Good. They shouldn’t.

Unencrypted channels are the ones that are easiest to trace, and the easiest ones to successfully base a prosecution on.

The most correct response is to report them to law enforcement. Unencrypted channels make amazingly effective honeypots. It’s fairly easy to bust people using unencrypted channels, esp. because people think they’re anonymous and safe. It’s much, much harder to bust people once they move to .onion sites and the real dark net away from their phone. When you shut down all the easy channels, you push people into areas where it’s much harder, almost impossible, to root them out.

What if telegram refuses to cooperate with law enforcement in a timely fashion to provide details of the people sharing that material? What should law enforcement do then?
I think that holding the executives and BoD in criminal contempt of court is a good place to start.
At that point they’re willingly hosting it for no reason other than to host it for their customers and they’re complicit, no?

Look, if you’re going to knowingly host child porn, and not take it down even after you have been made aware, you get what’s coming to you.

The idea that Telegram would somehow better serve their customers by staging law enforcement stings in unencrypted channels is completely divorced from Telegram’s core mission.

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech or the right to encrypt. Child Pornography is a criminal matter. Failure to cooperate with law enforcement while providing comms and distribution to child pornographers is going to land you in deep shit eventually.