Why has Pavel Durov been arrested and why do French prosecutors see Telegram as a threat?
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00:00Telegram. What's the difference between that, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, any other way of keeping in touch with people?
00:08Well, I'm very glad you asked because there are crucial differences. You called it an encrypted messaging app.
00:14You're not wrong, but crucially, it's not an end-to-end encrypted messaging app.
00:19It has that as an option, but it's surprisingly hard to activate it.
00:23That makes it very, very different from WhatsApp and from Signal that are end-to-end encrypted by default.
00:29That means that when you send a message to me over WhatsApp or over Signal,
00:34the WhatsApp and Signal servers, anyone on those servers looking into them, whether they be the company or someone else, cannot read those messages.
00:43That's not how Telegram works. The vast majority of messages sent on Telegram are not end-to-end encrypted,
00:50meaning if you have access to the Telegram server, you can read exactly what is in those messages.
00:56Then there is another part of Telegram, which are the channels. These large groups can be up to 200,000 members strong.
01:05This allows mass broadcasting in a way that WhatsApp does not, Signal does not.
01:11I hear what you're saying. So when I use Telegram, which I do, to follow Vladimir Putin, hear what he's saying, Vladimir Zelensky,
01:17and at one point, the Wagner group, it's one of those kind of channels we're talking about.
01:21Exactly.
01:22Where's the threat? What's the threat angle? Why would Telegram's inventor be under investigation?
01:29Well, first of all, I can tell you what he's under investigation. He's been arrested amid charges that the Paris prosecutors have now published.
01:39This is a litany of serious crimes.
01:44Complicity with child sexual abuse material, complicity with organized crime, complicity with the traffic of narcotics, the list goes on.
01:55Above all, the second item on that list is failure to properly communicate with the authorities upon a request for police to act upon these groups.
02:06So that's really the nut to this.
02:12So this whole thing, the fact that you described that someone somewhere in Telegram Central could look in and see what's happening,
02:17clearly this must open some people who might be quite innocent to possible threats of blackmail.
02:22But clearly what we're talking about is perhaps a mass conspiracy of some great criminal nature, which could be in the hatching, as it were.
02:29We are simply talking about channels on Telegram that are used for criminal activity.
02:34Right.
02:35And the Paris prosecutors clearly feel that Telegram is not doing enough to cooperate with authorities to crack down on these.
02:43That's why we haven't seen these kind of charges.
02:46And by the way, this is a criminal case just in France, right?
02:50This isn't some thing organized by the EU or by the West as a whole.
02:55This is a Paris prosecution criminal case.
02:58That's a drop in the ocean. The ocean could be very, very big in this case, couldn't it?
03:01With big waves creating all kinds of problems.
03:04Telegram started in Russia, based in Dubai.
03:07Yeah.
03:08And I presume the oversight there is non-existent.
03:12Well, Durov himself said in his April interview with Tucker Carlson on the X platform that the reason he eventually moved to Dubai after trying to move to Germany,
03:22trying to move to San Francisco after leaving Russia, was precisely because he didn't get the kind of oversight or knocks on the door from the local authorities
03:33that he got in the US or the kind of loopholes he had to jump through in Germany with regards to hiring people.
03:40So he settled on Dubai.
03:42What we do not know at this stage is whether he knew he was under an arrest warrant in France or not.
03:48The public didn't know.
03:50Russian media is reporting that actually it was only minutes before his plane arrived that the arrest warrant was issued.
03:57We haven't seen evidence for that.
03:59We've seen in French media AFP reporting that actually he knew he was under an arrest warrant,
04:04and that made one investigator very surprised that he decided to take the flight at all.