The arrest Saturday in Paris of Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram, has put the messaging app in the spotlight. Prosecutors announced Monday that he was being held in pretrial detention as part of a cybercrime investigation.
What is Telegram?
At its core, Telegram is a messaging app, competing with services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage. For many of its users, it’s nothing more than that: a good place to chat with friends.
But the app also offers more social networking features than most of its competitors. Group chats are unlimited in size, as are Telegram’s broadcast “channels,” which allow users to “follow” individual accounts.
These channels also allow subscribers to leave comments under posts and have conversations with each other, in a way that’s more reminiscent of a Facebook group or even an old-fashioned Internet forum than a simple instant messaging service.
Is it encrypted?
This is a surprisingly controversial question. “Everything on Telegram, including chats, groups, media, and more, is encrypted using a combination of 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, 2048-bit RSA encryption, and a secure Diffie-Hellman key,” the company claims, and it’s true. But this is a different type of encryption than the one that has become standard in messaging apps, known as end-to-end encryption (e2e).
For Telegram users, unless they go through a laborious process of setting up a “secret chat” (which is not an option for group chats or broadcast channels), their messages are not protected from being read by Telegram itself — and so Telegram doesn’t have the same excuse for not helping law enforcement that its competitors can.
Who supports Telegram?
Despite this different approach to security, Telegram has long appealed to communities that haven’t found a home on more mainstream platforms; cryptocurrency advocates, anti-vaccine activists and QAnon followers have all migrated to the platform after crackdowns on social networks like Facebook.
Durov, once known as the “Russian Mark Zuckerberg,” has spoken out about his belief in the importance of free speech, and others with similar absolutist views, including Elon Musk, have come to his defense.
Surprisingly, Russia has also expressed concern about the arrest, having taken control of his first company, VKontakte, a clone of Facebook, and Telegram, founded by Durov in exile.
He is now believed to hold three other nationalities in addition to his Russian passport, but that has not stopped the Russian foreign ministry from attacking France over its detention of the chief executive.
Why did the French arrest Durov?
The French accusations are broadly based on Telegram’s failure to combat the use of the service for criminal purposes, including the distribution of child pornography.
The investigation involves crimes related to illicit transactions, sexual abuse of minors, fraud and refusal to provide information to authorities. The arrest warrant was issued by OFMIN, the French child protection agency, the organization’s secretary general said in a message published on LinkedIn.
It is extremely rare for web service providers to be held liable for the actions of their users, and even rarer for them to be held personally liable. It is not yet clear whether Telegram’s alleged failings are extraordinary or whether the escalation is more on the side of the French authorities.
In a statement released Sunday, Telegram said Durov “has nothing to hide” and that “it is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the abuse of that platform.”
What does this mean for other messaging services?
Some have already spoken out over fears of a “chilling effect”, with executives feeling they have to moderate and excessively censor their services for fear that their own safety will be at risk every time they go to Cannes for a holiday.
The arrest is also expected to accelerate the move toward universal end-to-end encryption, with executives unable to be held responsible for content they cannot see.
Details of Durov’s arrest remain unclear, including whether his behavior was consistent with industry standards.
In 2015, for example, the founder of Telegram rightly rejected accusations that his platform was a haven for the Islamic State, saying only that “privacy is more important than our fear of bad things, like terrorism.”
