Pavel Durov’s arrest suggests that the law enforcement dragnet is being widened from private financial transactions to private speech.
The arrest of the Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France this week is extremely significant. It confirms that we are deep into the second crypto war, where governments are systematically seeking to prosecute developers of digital encryption tools because encryption frustrates state surveillance and control. While the first crypto war in the 1990s was led by the United States, this one is led jointly by the European Union — now its own regulatory superpower.
Durov, a former Russian, now French citizen, was arrested in Paris on Saturday, and has now been indicted. You can read the French accusations here. They include complicity in drug possession and sale, fraud, child pornography and money laundering. These are extremely serious crimes — but note that the charge is complicity, not participation. The meaning of that word “complicity” seems to be revealed by the last three charges: Telegram has been providing users a “cryptology tool” unauthorised by French regulators.
This may not be a symptom of such a plan, but there very much is such a plan.
Exportation of PGP and similar “strong encryption” in the 90s was considered as exporting munitions by the DoD.
More recently you can take your pick.
Governments DO NOT like people having encryption that isn’t backdoored. CSAM is literally the “but won’t someone think of the children” justification they use, and while the goals may be admirable in this case, the potential harm of succeeding in their quest to ban consumer-accessible strong encryption seems pretty obvious to me.
As a bonus - anyone remember Truecrypt?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/rhodium-enterprises-bitcoin-usd-loan-bankruptcy
https://www.csoonline.com/article/547356/microsoft-subnet-encryption-canary-or-insecure-app-truecrypt-warning-says-use-microsoft-s-bitlocker.html