Who is behind the Arrest of the Telegram Founder?

What happened?

Pavel Durov, a Russian billionaire and founder of messaging app Telegram was arrested in Paris yesterday on charges of terrorism, trafficking and money laundering. These charges allegedly stem from his refusal to “moderate” content on Telegram and provide back doors that would allow governments to access end-to-end encrypted communications between users.

Many are deeply concerned about his arrest which is seen as an escalation of the censorship and harassment of journalists and dissidents that has become widespread across mainland Europe and the UK. But how did we get here?

Disinformation - is it a real problem?

Many believe that we are seeing a sharp rise in the spread of “disinformation”. But is this really true? While disinformation may be rife on the internet, the barrier to entry for competing narratives is extremely low. This generates healthy debate, a process that we humans have used from time immemorial to derive truth.

Historically this was not the case. Communication platforms were few in number, centrally controlled and the barriers to entry were high. This made it easy for the governing class to control access to information and guide the general public towards their preferred narratives.

The internet has changed all that.

This presents a huge problem for the governing class. With the passing of the Brexit vote and Trump’s election in 2016, Brazil’s election of Bolsonaro and India’s election of Modi’s in 2018, they have gone into censorship overdrive in an effort to maintain their control over the information flow and ability to shape public discourse.

Controlling the narrative

We see these efforts play out in the systematic attempts to bribe and coerce media and communications platforms to censor content and provide back doors to their services.

After Elon Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 he said that he had purchased a “crime scene”. This statement was followed by revelations that the US government, through its various intelligence agencies had coerced Twitter to delete tweets and shadow ban or outright de-platform hundreds of users whose views were not aligned with regime narratives.

The US spent several years attempting to have Julian Assange extradited to the US for revealing US war crimes to a global audience. Assange spent 12 years in confinement for his troubles, first at the Ecuadorian embassy and then in the UK’s Belmash prison, where he languished for 5 years, despite not having been charged with any crimes. As though that weren’t enough, Mike Pompeo, then Secretary of State for the US attempted to have him assassinated.

Richard Medhurst, a British journalist critical of the Israeli genocide in Gaza was arrested recently on arrival at Heathrow airport in London under the UK “Terrorism Act” after having criticised the act before boarding his plane.

Mike Benz, a former US State Department Official wrote an extensive article in July 2022 detailing how several US tax-payer funded organisations had acted in concert to censor and control chat services such as WhatsApp and Telegram in order to prevent “undesirable” candidates like Bolsonaro in Brazil and Modi in India from being elected.

Benz contends that most of these censorship efforts originate from the US, an empire that seeks to control other countries by applying pressure to ensure that the results of those countries elections are favourable to US interests.

American citizens may be surprised to find out that they are funding most of these efforts through their taxes.

Source: https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/us-tax-dollars-funding-text-message-censorship-in-brazil/

While there are calls for tech companies to “cut off Europe” most Americans are largely unaware that these global censorship efforts are driven by their own administration and its intel agencies through a web of international NGOs.

Tech companies are in a bind as the threat of domestic regulation which would destroy their business models is regularly deployed by the US administration to ensure that they put profit over principle.

Pavel Durov refused to do that. The founder of Telegram famously left Russia in 2013, after the FSB (formerly KGB) requested that he hand over information about users on VKontakte, a predecessor to Telegram that was eventually taken over by the Russian administration via Putin loyalists. Once in the US, he built and launched Telegram. However, these days he lives in Dubai and rarely travels to the US. In a recent interview with US media figure Tucker Carlson, Durov stated that US intel agencies had secretly attempted to hire an engineer of his in order to compromise the security of the Telegram platform.

His arrest has sent a chilling message to tech founders globally ‘if you support free communication between private citizens and deny us a back door, we will come after you’.

What now?

While the legal process plays out, it is important that France’s actions be loudly and widely condemned. It is also important that both global and US citizens recognise where these censorship efforts originate from. Evil flourishes in the dark and shining a light on these totalitarian tendencies is both urgent and important.

What about you?

Start thinking seriously about how you can protect yourself, your family and your communities from censorship. You can research surveillance companies and who is funding them here.

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“Censorship is the child of fear
the father of ignorance
and the desperate weapon of fascists everywhere.”

―Laurie Halse Anderson,Shout