Telegram has practically refused all cooperation with the authorities. Now it threatens to hit the ankle of other messaging services as well, writes technology journalist Teemu Hallamaa.
Teemu Hallamaa technology reporter
Founder of Telegram Pavel Durov was arrested a week ago Saturday in Paris when his private plane landed at Le Bourget airport. On Wednesday, charges were filed against him slide the chargesrelated to illegal content shared on Telegram.
In practice, the background to Durov’s arrest is the question of the extent to which social media services are responsible for the content shared by their users.
The French Attorney General believes that Telegram is at least partially responsible for the illegal activities that take place on the platform, which include, for example, drug trafficking and the distribution of material containing sexual abuse of children. This is an extraordinary view.
Last year, the US Supreme Court ruled in two cases that internet companies are not legally responsible for the content downloaded by their users. Both cases were related to the distribution of terrorist content.
In Europe, too, until now it has been agreed, with certain marginal conditions, that the big platforms are not responsible for how users use their services. These marginal conditions have been tightened in recent years, but arresting the CEO of a technology company is still a surprising move.
Durov’s arrest does not mean that Mark Zuckerberg’s should put his visit to Europe on hold. Telegram’s performance has been exceptional. The company has practically refused all cooperation with the authorities.
This line has led to the fact that Telegram seems to play a role in almost all crimes that take place on the Internet. This, in turn, has led to the fact that the authorities are exceptionally critical of the company’s operations.
The cooperation between social media companies and the authorities is a sensitive topic, but the general operating model has become that if the authorities demand information about its users from the company by court order, the company will provide what it can.
This is where encryption sets limits to collaboration. In 2016, US authorities demanded that Apple unlock the phone of the San Bernandino mass shooter. Apple refused to crack the phone’s encryption, but released all other information that was unencrypted on the company’s servers.
The same goes for Meta. Meta voluntarily screens materials containing sexual abuse of children from its services. However, the company doesn’t even try to screen these contents in the end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messaging app, as this would effectively create a backdoor to encryption.
In other words, neither Apple nor Meta can help the authorities in cases where communications have been end-to-end encrypted.
Telegram advertises itself as an encrypted communication application, but in practice only part of the communication through it is end-to-end encrypted. Most of the communication in the service is open.
Group chats with tens or hundreds of thousands of participants would not be possible if Telegram encrypted them. Whatsapp and Signal, which use end-to-end encryption, allow a maximum of a thousand user conversations.
In Telegram, the vast majority of illegal content is shared in closed, but not encrypted, groups. The information of these groups is in readable form on the company’s servers. Telegram would therefore be able to screen content in the same way that Meta screens, for example, Facebook.
However, Telegram relies on encryption and the fact that the encryption keys of its servers are distributed around the world. In order for the company to agree to hand over the requested information to the authorities, the authorities must apply for a court order in each country where the keys are kept. No country has embarked on this process.
If the conversations in Telegram groups were end-to-end encrypted, the company could use the same reasoning as Apple and Meta when refusing to cooperate with the authorities. It couldn’t help them. Now Telegram refuses because it just doesn’t want to cooperate.
Although Telegram is not a good example of an encrypted messaging service by any standard, Durov’s arrest may have an impact on the use of end-to-end encryption and thereby on people’s privacy.
Duvrov’s indictment has three points dealing with the use of encryption technology. For example, he is accused of offering encryption technology without the permission of the authorities.
The New York Times reportedthat this point has caused astonishment among technology companies. The concern is that Telegram gives encryption a bad name.
This shouldn’t happen. Already, states are trying to weaken encryption in people’s everyday communications. A bill is underway in the EU that would oblige technology companies to screen material containing sexual abuse of children in their services. According to data security experts, if implemented, the proposal would significantly undermine the foundations of digital communication and weaken people’s privacy protection.
Defending people’s privacy and encryption is harder if you have to defend Telegram’s indifference at the same time.