It’s unfortunate that Telegram founder Pavel Durov has been detained based on what appears to be overzealous enforcement of some moderation requirements.
In that vein I’d like share a few thoughts on the topic,
Telegram as many Cypherpunks have pointed out was an unencrypted, centralized service that everyday put all its users at risk and painted a target on its founder & employees BY DESIGN.
They chose to design a system where attacks on the operators were not only feasible, in many cases they are the most profitable attack (especially when accomplished in secret against the users interest).
The whole concept of secure & pseudonymous Cypherpunk crypto was first build as Mixmaster an anonymous remailer which was written in response to the Church of a Scientology suing to get access to database of pseudonyms in the
http://Anon.penet.fi legal case which ultimately caused the pseudonym service to shut down.
Penet remailer - Wikipedia
This directly led to the creation of Mixmaster anonymous mail relays, TOR and our own service ZeroKnowledge Freedom. The design principles for all of these were to include no trusted third party and use cryptography to enable the user to control their own identity.
By removing the 3rd party trusted entity it made everyone safer including the operator of the service.
Also while everyone rails against the French government for arresting Pavel, it’s not a concept foreign to Western democracies like Canada and United States.
Hushmail was encrypted private email compromised with a back door and data dump ordered by US government
E-Gold was a 10yr old online payments service linking gold deposits to online payments operated by Cypherpunk Douglas Jackson. He was arrested, threatened with 20yrs in prison and his company shuttered after he asked for the rules to operate legally and instead of defining them, he was persecuted.
WIRED
Bullion and Bandits: The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold
MELBOURNE, Florida — In a sparsely decorated office suite two floors above a neighborhood of strip malls and car dealerships, former oncologist D...
The operators of Backpage a commercial competitor to Craiglist build by local newspaper entrepreneurs (
https://reason.com/2018/11/15/the-backpage-scandal-isnt-what/) were arrested and the government spend more than 5yrs in court arguing that they couldn’t even use the 1st amendment as a defence.
Reason.com
Prosecutors say Backpage defendants shouldn't be allowed to reference 1st Amendment
Prosecutors also want a judge to take basically all possible defenses off the table.
This was after a mistrial, a judgement of prosecutorial overreach, government officials still appealed with the sole intent of removing any mention of freedom of speech as a right. This was essentially the government claiming that they didn’t moderate ads properly.
Kik Interacrive and Canadian messaging app with 100employees was sued for $100m and ultimately shut down following prosecution by the SEC for an illegal token sale.
https://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/kitchener-based-messaging-app-kik-to-close-amid-digital-token-lawsuit-1.4607874(Remember Telegram completed a token sale which made its founder a billionaire)
There are many more cases that I could reference from
@KimDotcom
, Ross Ulbricht and Wikileaks.
Conclusion
The facts are still out with regards to the specific law Pavel is being held on. It’s not clear if this is just a French government prosecution or a multilateral effort with US Government participation. (as seen above extra jurisdictional application of its laws in cyberspace is the norm)
Before everyone answers the call to invade France, or to take up arms to free Pavel we need to know more about the specific charges, remedies being sought and what the exposure the the millions of Telegrams users is.
Regardless the Cypherpunks who’ve long pointed out that unencrypted, centralized services are a risk to users and the operators of that service are the ones who get to claim “I told you so”.
Your protections in the digital age shouldn’t be based on the fickle policies of governments, or the goodwill of an operator who hopes not to be forced to betray you. Use services that are trust minimized.
We called our company ZeroKnowledge for a reason. If there was a gun to our head we couldn’t violate our users privacy. It wasn’t possible. — that should be the standard.
Post by Austin Hill @austinhill
