On 24 August, Pavel Durov, the Russian billionaire owner of encrypted messaging app Telegram, was arrested by French police. Interrogated for four days, he was yesterday transported to a court and charged on all counts. Now, awaiting trial, he has been released on a €5 million bail, must visit the French police twice a week, and has been prevented from leaving France. A warrant is also out for the arrest of his brother, the co-founder of Telegram.
This incredibly bold move by the French authorities has been presented as a routine cybercrime sting against the proliferation of child porn and other nefarious activities. Macron himself has reassured us that the arrest is “not political”.
But the idea that a small office of the Ministry of Justice would unilaterally go after the ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ of Russia, who happens to be the gatekeeper of the private communications of almost a billion people, is laughable.
On the contrary: this is an unprecedented and scandalous political attack on freedom of speech and privacy of communications. The aim of the French state and its allies is to gain access to the vast amount of user information on Telegram, to set a legal precedent, and to send a message that any messaging service that doesn’t allow the secret police to peep inside its contents will be hit with the full force of the law.
Complicit?
Durov has been branded with a litany of shocking charges, which include selling drugs, fraud, and possession of child porn. However, none of these crimes have been committed by Durov himself. Rather he is being charged as complicit in all the misdeeds that have taken place on his platform.
Durov has been branded with a litany of shocking charges / Image: TechCrunch, Flickr
This is patently ridiculous, just as it would be ridiculous to charge Johannes Gutenberg for all the rubbish that gets printed on paper. In reality, the eyebrow-raising crimes of complicity are a secondary matter for the French cops. Plenty of rich criminals, and facilitators of crime, have enjoyed sojourns in France without hassle.
Macron’s government has wined and dined tyrants from across the world, including Saudi butchers and Israel war criminals. The French police certainly didn’t have a problem with Durov's ‘complicity’ when, in 2018, he was personally invited to a private dinner with Macron, who asked him to move the headquarters of Telegram to Paris.
The real import of the arrest is signalled by the following charges, which are mixed in amongst the smokescreen of outrageous accusations:
“Refusal to communicate, at the request of competent authorities, information or documents necessary for carrying out and operating interceptions allowed by law,” and “Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified Declaration” [emphasis mine]
The case was put more bluntly earlier this year by Europol, the law enforcement agency of the EU, which put out a statement demanding end-to-end encryption be banned and that tech monopolies provide built-in backdoors in their systems so that companies and the police can monitor their data. This is what the arrest really concerns.
Telegram
This attack is only the most recent and audacious in the attempts of various governments, by hook or by crook, to get their hands on the data held by Durov.
Durov and his brother initially founded VKontakte, a Russian equivalent of Facebook, in 2006. From 2011, in the midst of protests against the Russian regime, they came under pressure to disclose the identity of protestors to the FSB and to sell the platform to an oligarch loyal to Putin. The same occurred during the Maidan movement of 2013-2014, where, upon refusing, Durov had his house raided, and was effectively forced into selling VKontakte to the regime. He was fired as its CEO and fled Russia.
In 2013, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s leak that Microsoft, Google, Apple and other tech monopolies had granted backdoor access to US intelligence, Durov went on to found Telegram as a secure messaging platform.
Quickly growing to become one of the most popular messaging apps on the planet, Telegram attracted the ire of governments around the world. In 2017, Durov had his phone hacked in a joint operation by France and the UAE (he is a citizen of both countries), and reports that he is constantly greeted by FBI agents at the airport, attempting to obtain his cooperation. Because of its constant refusal to hand over information, Telegram has been banned (temporarily or permanently) in 31 countries since 2015.
Alongside drug dealers, pornographers, Zelensky, Hamas, and, ironically, the French cabinet, Telegram has been a key means of organisation for protests and revolutionary movements in Hong Kong, Iran, Thailand, and Belarus / Image: own work
But Telegram is popular precisely because it has so far resisted these pressures. Today, Telegram has 950 million monthly active users, up from 500 million in 2021. It forms one blindspot in the vast surveillance apparatus of the ruling classes of the world, and, as a result, the platform has become a haven for those who want to communicate securely.
Alongside drug dealers, pornographers, Zelensky, Hamas, and, ironically, the French cabinet, Telegram has been a key means of organisation for protests and revolutionary movements in Hong Kong, Iran, Thailand, and Belarus, among others.
Telegram is also an extremely important means of communication on either side of the Ukraine war. On the Russian side, according to the son of the former chief of the Russian Space agency, Telegram is used for “intelligence transfer, artillery course-correction, video streaming from copters” and more. In the estimation of Ruslan Leviev, head of an organisation which investigates the activities of the Russian military, “pretty much every Russian soldier has it installed.”
In Ukraine, Telegram has become a news source for at least 70 percent of the population. The platform is the main source of up-to-date battlefield information, information which doesn’t necessarily coincide with the chorus of western propaganda. Unable to control the flow of information, the Ukrainian government has publicly attacked Telegram, and last year even threatened to ban it entirely.
Telegram is therefore one of the juiciest troves of information in the world, information which all the imperialist powers – for offence and defence – have an interest in securing. If any government were able to gain access to the encryption keys and crack this piggy bank – which would require the cooperation of Durov – it would be an enormous weapon in the hands of its intelligence service, which could be used to potentially eavesdrop on, compromise, or behead any opposing organisation using the platform.
It is a prospect so tantalising that it has driven ‘democratic’ France to commit such a brazen violation of democracy.
The present act is not an isolated effort. In the wake of Durov’s arrest, the EU and India have both revealed that they are launching their own investigations into the platform.
NSA PowerPoint slide leaked by Edward Snowdon in 2013, revealing the information collected by the intelligence agency / Image: fair use
It would be extremely surprising if the US intelligence didn’t have something to do with this. The NSA, the ears of American imperialism, controls a vast, worldwide apparatus of surveillance which, as of 2021, was revealed to be directly targeting over 230,000 individuals and organisations, and collecting hundreds of millions of communications, foreign and domestic.
Notoriously, Snowden’s 2013 leaks revealed it to have struck up secret deals with tech monopolies to snoop on the traffic passing through their platforms, giving US intelligence unmitigated access to ‘private’ messaging on Whatsapp, Instagram, IMessage, and Facebook. But the users of Telegram have remained outside their reach. A leaked 2021 FBI document which breaks down what the agency can legally access of each messaging platform shows that Telegram is the most opaque. Therefore, and especially because of its value to Russian imperialism, compromising Telegram is of particular interest to Washington.
Crackdown on freedom of speech
Today the internet, and particularly social media, plays a significant role in facilitating the class struggle, as the ruling class well understands. It is an unprecedented means of instantaneous, global communication which can be used as a tool to inform, assemble and coordinate vast masses of people, as seen from the Arab Spring, to Kenya and Bangladesh more recently, where those governments shut down the internet precisely to block off this avenue of communication. Consequently it has become an important target for government repression. In the last five years, the internet was taken offline during protests 191 times by 30 different countries.
France has pioneered this tactic in the West. In 2023, in the midst of the wave of protests in response to the murder of Nahel Merzouk by police, Macron floated banning Snapchat and Tiktok. This year, Macron’s suggestion was actually carried out: during the riots in New Caledonia, a French colony, the government suspended Tiktok alongside the imposition of a curfew and the deployment of troops.
Countries in which Telegram is fully or partially blocked / Image: MohammedAlbaqirkhalid, Wikimedia Commons
However the current assault on freedom of speech is not confined to the digital world. Pro-Palestinian activists across Europe and America have been subjected to a barrage of scandalous attacks by the state.
Recently, Richard Medhurst, a pro-Palestinian journalist with a large following on X/Twitter, was dragged off a plane, arrested by British police, and detained in humiliating conditions for 24 hours. Recorded the whole time, he was refused the right to a call or any insight into the reason for his arrest. To add to the Orwellian nature of the attack, Medhurst had booked his plane ticket on the same day, which implies that he was being surveilled and directly targeted. He is the first journalist to be charged under section 12 of the UK’s Terrorism Act.
Similarly, in 2023, French left-wing publisher Ernest Moret, was arrested on his way to the London book fair. In an attack that reveals the scandalous cooperation of British and French police in hassassing political dissidents, Moret was held under terrorism legislation because of his participation in the French anti-pension reform protests. He was interrogated as to whether he supported Macron, his phone and laptop were seized for more than 10 weeks, and his sim card was downloaded. In this case, the police were forced to apologise and pay £500,000 in compensation.
But this apology is an exception to the rule. Countless demonstrators, journalists and students have been harassed, intimidated, or jailed in recent months, including communists from the RCI.
Like the victimisation of Snowden, Assange, and Manning, these are all part of a campaign of political persecution. Under the guise of anti-terrorism and fighting crime, the cops of the ‘democratic’ imperialist powers are cudgelling and threatening all those bold enough to stand up against their atrocities at home and abroad.
Communists and freedom of communication
We have no particular fondness for Pavel Durov. However it is to his credit that, whatever his motivation may be, he has maintained his integrity against the encroachment of the intelligence agencies of the world.
Pavel Durov's personal character is totally secondary. His actual crime is refusing to assist the French state and its friends in spying on Telegram’s users. What the case really comes down to is whether the state should have the right to snoop on the communications of private individuals in a private forum.
We, as communists, unequivocally oppose the arrest of Durov, which makes a complete mockery of freedom of communication. A genuine democracy would guarantee the right of organisation, expression, and publication unmonitored by the secret police.
But how can ‘democracy’ – capitalist democracy that is – guarantee this when the privacy of almost a billion people now hinges on the integrity of one man? Where the means of communication are in the hands of individual capitalists, genuine freedom of speech will always be circumscribed by their private interests, which, by and large, overlap with the state, as evidenced by the capitulation of the majority of tech billionaires to the NSA.
Bourgeois ‘democrats’ present communism as the antithesis of free speech. But under capitalism free speech is always under threat. It is not a guarantee, but a tool which can be snatched away when necessary. In the context of the world crisis of capitalism and a rising tide of class struggle, the defenders of the capitalist class are more and more dispensing with their democratic tools in favour of the gag and baton.
Ultimately no single app, no matter how secure it purports to be, can ensure genuine freedom of speech. The only real guarantee would be a world without NSA’s, GCHQ’s, billionaire tech giants, and states with an interest in stamping out dissent in order to maintain the freedom of a miniscule, propertied minority to exploit the rest of humanity. That is, communism.