Firefox french translation, not perfect but usable.
Why was he under threat of a research mandate?
The Justice considers that the lack of moderation, cooperation with the forces of law and order and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) makes it complicit in drug trafficking, paedo criminal offences and fraud.
This research mandate ran if, and only if, Pavel Durov were in the national territory. “He made a pellet tonight. We don’t know why… Was this theft just one step? In any case, it is ready-made”, slips a source close to the investigation to TF1/LCI. Ever since he knew himself persona non grata in France, Pavel Durov used to travel to the Emirates, to the countries of the former USSR, to South America … He had travelled very little in Europe and avoided the countries where Telegram is under surveillance.
What now?
Investigators from the National Anti-Fraud Office attached to the Customs Directorate (ONAF) notified him and held him in police custody. He should be presented to an investigating judge this Saturday evening before a possible indictment on Sunday for a multitude of offences: terrorism, narcotics, complicity, fraud, money laundering, concealment, child-criminal content…
Pavel Valeryevich Durov(Russian: Павел Валерьевич Дуров; born 10 October 1984)[4] is a Russian-born Emirati entrepreneur who is known for founding the social networking site VK and the app Telegram Messenger. He is the younger brother of Nikolai Durov. As of 29 September 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$15.1 billion. In 2022, he was recognized as the richest expat in the United Arab Emirates, according to Forbes. In February 2023, Arabian Business named him the most powerful entrepreneur in Dubai.
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translation of major allegation :
“The (French) Justice system considers that the lack of moderation, cooperation with law enforcement, and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable numbers, cryptocurrencies, etc.) make it an accomplice to drug trafficking, pedocriminal offenses, and scams.”
I agree but its not even an encrypted messenger. Almost no one uses the weak encryption and im pretty sure they offer decryption to governments considering they were threatened to be banned in russia and avoided it
Making a tool that provides a private communication service literally everyone should have unrestricted access to does not make you an accomplice to anything.
The ISP will absolutely cooperate with law enforcement though, unlike telegram. That seems the nature of the issue in that there is a lack of moderation and oversight, which anonymity is not mutually-exclusive from flagging nefarious activities, ideally. I REALLY am not too keen on giving safe harbor to the likes of pedos and traffickers and what have you.
I REALLY am not too keen on giving safe harbor to the likes of pedos and traffickers and what have you.
Secure communication between individuals is a fundamental right. That nefarious activities can be conducted over secure channels can never be justification for suspending that right.
I’m not sure I yet agree with that. People can have secure communications; that’s called meeting in person and in a private room. That line gets blurred with intercontinental mass-communication that ultimately is beyond the use of the average citizen and is more frequently utilized to nefarious ends. If the damage outweighs the benefits to society, then clearly a rational limit perhaps should be considered.
Ultimately, what matters is respecting the house rules; and if the house rules of France were broken, why in the world would he travel there?
That line gets blurred with intercontinental mass-communication that ultimately is beyond the use of the average citizen and is more frequently utilized to nefarious ends.
I reject the premise of your argument: secure communication is not more frequently used for nefarious purposes than non-nefarious purposes.
But even if I accepted that premise, I would still reject your argument. The underlying principle of your argument is misanthropy: humans are inherently evil. They will always choose evil, and therefore, they must never have an ability to effectively dissent from totalitarian control.
The dangers posed just by the French government greatly exceed the dangers posed by every single person who ever has or ever will “nefariously communicate” over every communications platform that has ever been or ever will be invented.
Yeah I haven’t committed to one side or the other yet. For me it’s less about misanthropy and more about transparency and accountability. The nature of the French democratic government means it is by extension held accountable to some albeit imperfect extent by the people. After all, the laws are by Transitive Property an extension of the people. But who holds accountable the sex trafficker that cannot be tracked? Conversely we can always say, “if you’re doing nothing wrong, then why do you need to hide it?” An age-old dilemma. There probably should be a reasonable middle-ground between privacy and accountability.
The sex trafficker can absolutely be tracked by doing old-fashioned police work: you spend time, money and energy to infiltrate the network, gain their trust and eventually take them down. But this requires police funding and training.
“if you’re doing nothing wrong, then why do you need to hide it?” An age-old dilemma.
It’s not a dilemma, the answer has been given multiple times: under the rule of law, law enforcement has to prove (or at least demonstrate a strong suspiscion) that you’re involved in illegal activities before they can intrude in your privacy.
But with the advent of mass data gathering and the exemple given by the NSA, all law enforcement agencies dream to change this paradigm.
Why? They happily hand all your data over to whoever asks and so does everyone else that’s why they can single them out because you’re already bought and paid for.
As always, there’s a lot of nuance which is lost on Lemmy users.
It’s a question of exactly what telegram is being used for, what telegram the company can reasonably be aware of, what they’ve been asked to do, and what they’ve done.
The issue I see with Telegram is that they retain a certain control over the content on their platform, as they have blocked channels in the past. That’s unlike for example Signal, which only acts as a carrier for the encrypted data.
If they have control over what people are able to share via their platform, the relevant laws should apply, imho.
Gotta add that “pedocriminal” thing so people don’t argue against it. Don’t wanna be seen “supporting pedocriminals” by supporting encrypted communications
The catch-22 is that it’s impossible to make this tool freely available as-is without also enabling the child abuse. You can’t pry the apart, or at the very least nobody has managed to yet.
So do we accept the abuse and let it proliferate, in the name of privacy? Or do we sacrifice privacy to make sure theres not a safe place for abusers?
There is no answer where no one gets hurt. It sucks when the interests of good align with the interests of bad, and it’s a shit show one way or the other.
The Catholic Church abuses kids, so… ban that. Ban adults alone in a room with a child—something could happen. Oh, sometimes they get abuse at school… so, that’s gotta go. Oh no, they get abused on the internet… bye bye internet.
You can’t say “this could be used to abuse a child” because you could abuse a child with a spoon, but I’ll be damned if I’ll eat soup with a fork.
The Catholic Church should absolutely face dire consequences for the abuse they perpetuate and defend. Loss of tax status, prison for all abusers and those who assisted them in avoiding jail. You are making a great parallel.
It’s not that it “could be” used to abuse a child, wtf. It’s that is has already been widely adopted. It’s currently happening. Same as the Catholic Church.
You’re really trying hard to make this about “possible” crimes while ignoring the material ones.
No I’m not. Stopping private conversations will only hurt people. Kids will continue to be abused regardless. They were before Telegram, they will be after. Any “protect the children” by removing rights is never about the children.
But roads are heavily regulated and monitored. In fact, they’re directly managed by the government. If I experience road rage I can call the police with the license plate number and there’s databases of drivers with pictures and VINs etc. This is not the point you think you were making.
the lack of implanted radio telemetry …
Absolutely wild that you’re accusing others of idiotic horseshit
has nothing to do with Russia, according to the linked article
Pourquoi était-il sous la menace d’un mandat de recherche ?
La Justice considère que l’absence de modération, de coopération avec les forces de l’ordre et les outils proposés par Telegram (numéro jetable, cryptomonnaies…) le rend complice de trafic de stupéfiants, d’infractions pédocriminels et d’escroquerie.
Ce mandat de recherche courait si, et seulement si, Pavel Durov se trouvait sur le territoire national.
En effet, Telegram est une ruche pour les contenus criminels. En ce moment, la plateforme fait l’actualité avec la diffusion illégale des matchs de Ligue 1. Mais sur cette messagerie chiffrée, de nombreux comptes sont utilisés par la criminalité organisée. Au-delà du terrorisme, les plus dangereux pédocriminels communiquent sur Telegram pour échanger des contenus. “C’est devenu depuis des années LA plateforme numéro 1 pour le crime organisé”, commente un enquêteur.
Several of the defendants were questioned about their use of tools and software such as Signal, Tor and Tails, and about the encryption of their computers and hard drives. The questioning followed the same pattern as the prosecution’s investigations, which we revealed a few months ago: a huge amount of confusion as to the technical understanding of these tools combined with a suspicious approach to their actual use. Three defendants were questioned about their motivation for using such software, as if a well-argued justification was needed, even though the tools are perfectly normal, legal and ordinary.
“It is possible and not forbidden to have these tools, but we can ask ourselves why dissimulate information” the president of the court stated. Suspicion of clandestinity coupled with little knowledge of the subject was evident in their questions: “You explain that the use of this ‘kind of network’ [Signal] was to preserve your privacy, but are you afraid of being monitored?”. Or: “Why did you think it was important or a good idea to find out about this ‘kind of environment’ [the Tails operating system]?”.
Justice considers that the absence of moderation, cooperation with law enforcement and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) makes it complicit in drug trafficking, child crime offenses and fraud.
Same reason Russia wanted to arrest him, failure to do the government’s bidding.
Not really comparable because the illegal content is hosted and distributed through his servers. Which is why most sites are moderated to a degree. This dude basically said “fuck off” whenever takedowns were issued. It’s hardly a surprise that he’s been arrested.
If the CEO of Lyft got repeated warnings that this very thing was happening and ignored them willfully, then yes. In the end he has nobody to blame but himself. It’s no different from hosting a file sharing platform without ever vetting the content and wondering why the cops show up one day. The stupidity of going to France knowing that you’re a wanted man in a number of countries is just the cherry on top.
The rental company, on the other hand, is more than willing to turn you in to not be considered liable. Which they probably would be if they impeded an investigation.
Except that’s disanalogous, since it is impossible for an encryption service to provide the information being subpoenaed by definition. It would be like expecting Hertz to divulge a random customer’s favorite color. Why the fuck would a car rental company know a customer’s favorite color? How would they even find out? And how would an encryption service know what you’re encrypting?
If getting rid of privacy is what you think it takes to be safe and civilized in this world, you are not the latter and you don’t deserve the former.
Illegal content is distributed through snail mail and telephones too, but those are common carriers so they aren’t liable. Why should Telegram be any different?
The Justice considers that the lack of moderation, cooperation with the forces of law and order and the tools offered by Telegram (disposable number, cryptocurrencies, etc.) makes it complicit in drug trafficking, paedo criminal offences and fraud.
But a lot of people are speculating they just fabricated claims to arrest him because Telegram is russian.
As the CEO he should be responsible for anything he was facilitating as part of his business, and that would include crimes committed using telegram that he was aware of and both did nothing to remove from his service and made it harder for law enforcement to prosecute. You know, like how a warehouse owner who knowingly sells space to pedos and does what he can to keep the police from searching the warehouee is complicit.
There are some circumstances where they are unaware or only take halfhearted measures, but in this case it looks like he is being investigated for actively working to enable criminals, including pedos. As the head executive, he doesn’t have to do it personally if he is directing staff to make it happen.
Edit: explaining the logic behind something isn’t the same as agreeing with that logic
I’m sorry, but it’s a private messaging app! Not even the owners are supposed to know what is going on in the chats. It’s not a moderation situation - I don’t know if he rejected a request to ban accounts, but it isn’t how things are supposed to be.
Well, the French police seem to be saying the way he is running the company involves being knowingly complicit, not that they just happen to be hosting/facilitating communication without the company’s knowledge.
They could be wrong, but this is part of the process of finding out.
Isn’t the main problem that most people don’t use the E2E encrypted chat feature on Telegram, so most of what’s going on is not actually private and Telegram does have the ability to moderate but refuses to (and also refuses to cooperate)?
Something like Signal gets around this by not having the technical ability to moderate (or any substantial data to hand over).
Exactly. Telegram has a ton of public channels full of content that is illegal in most EU countries and refuses to comply with any local laws on things like hate speech. They know perfectly well what their platform is used for, they just don’t care. It would be a wildly different case if everything were E2E encrypted by default.
TF1 (… standing for Télévision Française 1) is a French commercial television network … TF1’s average market share of 24% makes it the most popular (french) domestic network.
Yeah but how am I supposed to know what my knee jerk reaction to this story should be if someone doesn’t tell me whether it’s a left or right publication?
I can really see how this bot helps the moderation team and somehow lowers their volume of work as they’ve claimed multiple times for keeping it around despite everyone hating it for some reason or another.
tf1info.fr
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