By Willow (willowashmaple.sbs, formerly of willowashmaple.xyz)
Aug. 30, 2024 (Update: Aug. 31, 2024)
"Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" may be France's slogan harkening back to the cries of the French Revolution, but France has always maintained a rather authoritarian outlook on government. For example, the French government has long wielded its authority to regulate religious expressions in public, or even the language one speaks. The idea of "liberty" in our Common Law tradition differs substantially from the idea of "liberté" in the eyes of the Napoleonic laws.
It is in this context that Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, was recently arrested and charged with several alleged crimes, despite the fact that Telegram is neither a French company nor are its servers physically located on French territory -- the only nexus being Durov, formerly a Russian citizen who fled Putin's dictatorship, a French citizen.
The news of Durov's arrest immediately drew a broad international condemnation, from both civil libertarians and also from the far-right who benefit from Telegram's messaging services.
Among others, the French government accused Durov of "complicity" in various crimes because Telegram ostensibly failed to moderate and surveil its users' communications and offered end-to-end encryption.
This is where all this becomes problematic. If Telegram is criminal, so will be Signal, TeleGuard, or even WhatsApp. Durov's conviction could set the stage for a war on encryption and privacy, and companies will be forced to build backdoors or implement a real-time (likely an AI-powered) censorship and surveillance system -- a Chinese-style "cyber police" on steroids. As nation-states around the world increasingly assert their extraterritorial sovereign claims globally to cyberspace, countries ranging from the United States to Russia to Communist China will demand to snoop on everyone's private conversations. As security researchers agree, backdoors are inherently unsafe and are an invitation to exploitation by criminal actors as well as by authoritarian regimes around the world.
This trend is not limited to France. The European Union and the United Kingdom have recently enacted laws that purport to promote "online safety" that lead to this sort of widespread surveillance and undermining of encryption and security. Even some U.S. politicians of both parties have called for something similar.
As I always say, "Save Our Children!" is the most potent thought-terminating slogan used by power-hungry politicians to push unpopular, unconstitutional, and despotic legislation. Never mind they don't really care about children, they are just exploiting the natural human tendency to protect kids but their end games have little to do with that.
Even Albert Mohler, a Southern Baptist theologian and a known "Christian nationalist," has expressed concerns about this case and its long-term impact on freedom.
Speaking from a traditional Christian worldview, humankind inherits a fallen nature and its moral corruption. When a group of powerful but fallen and fallible humans form a government to rule over a populace with the power of swords, then their sinful and corrupt nature is magnified. Too often, the rulers and politicians try to play God. They seek to surveil everything that exists, to regulate everything that moves, and to tax everything of any value. Hence the rise of Protestantism, joined by the tide of Enlightenment, led a movement to restrain the government in Great Britain, North America, and elsewhere -- hitherto absolute monarchies often backed by the powerful Roman Catholic Church -- through constitutionalism, separation of powers, and a recognition of inherent and inalienable liberties given to individuals by God.
The French authorities' thirst for monitoring and censoring private thoughts and conversations of the masses is precisely this kind of "playing God" that must be stopped.
Their arguments and rationale for charging Durov with crimes are as absurd as charging car manufacturers and gas station owners for crimes committed by others using their motor vehicles; arresting makers and sellers of paper envelopes because some scammers used them to mail fraudulent letters or because some terrorists decided to send ricin or anthrax by mail; or prosecuting home builders because one of the houses they built became a drug den. Technology, like any other product, is morally neutral unless it is specifically invented to do evil things and nothing else (nuclear weapons aren't morally neutral). Telegram, for one, has been used by many freedom activists (as well as persecuted Christians) in repressive countries to communicate and organize.
One of the problems we have today is that messaging apps such as Telegram and Signal are still centralized walled gardens. If any government decides that it ought to be shut down, then it becomes a single point of failure. With Europe's Digital Services Act, successful and popular services like WhatsApp are already designated as "Very Large Online Platforms" (VLOP) and are subject to increased scrutiny and regulation. And even on secure platforms like Signal, users don't own encryption keys.
There is a need for building a truly decentralized system, in which end users create, manage, and own their keypairs (like PGP and OMEMO), and communications do not depend on any single server or company (something like ZeroNet but more robust, reliable, and user-friendly). So is a need for countries that stand up against this global trend and position themselves as a cyber haven for encryption, decentralization, zero-knowledge platforms, and blockchain tech -- just like many small, resource-poor countries have flourished as offshore banking havens.
In the coming days and years, Pavel Durov's name will be a cause célèbre, just as were the names of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. In a classic cypherpunk manner, I hope he, too, will ultimately prevail.
Edit (later on Aug. 30): Today, a Brazilian court issued an order for ISPs in Brazil to block all access to the X social media platform. The judge also included a stipulation threatening to punish individual end-users with a fine of 50,000 reais per day if they attempt to access X via VPN or any other means to circumvent the block. This is a whole new level of escalation in nation-states' war on an open, free, and borderless Internet. Not only that governments of the world increasingly assert a universal and extraterritorial jurisdiction over online platforms and services outside their own countries, but they are also building a sort of "cyber borders" -- something only a few despotic regimes (think China, Iran, and North Korea) have done in the past.
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What other commentators are saying (Tangle News)
Albert Mohler on Pavel Durov
Lawyer: Durov allegations are absurd
EFF: Don't break encryption
EDRi: How do CSA regulations affect us all?
The end of social media (CrimethInc)
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