Telegram as an independent intelligence agency

Is Pavel Durov's arrest a "free speech" issue?

Greetings from Read Max HQ! Some housekeeping announcements regarding recent outside media:

• For the Washington Post, I expanded on some of my thoughts on the phenomenon of “Explainer Movies,” previously discussed in this Read Max essay on Civil War.

• On Tuesday I was on screenwriter John August’s Scriptnotes podcast, discussing “Halogencore” and my writing process.

• Last week I was on artist and streamer Josh Citarella’s podcast talking about the Zynternet and the internet’s normie turn.

• The mensches at TrueAnon have dropped the paywall on the episode I did with them about Leopold Aschenbrenner from back in June.

I heartily recommend all of the subscription products associated with these outlets.

This week’s column is how we might think about the arrest in France of Telegram founder Pavel Durov.

A reminder: Read Max is funded entirely thanks the generosity and support of paying subscribers. The reporting, criticism, analysis, and shitposting you see here is a full-time job, and every subscriber helps me devote the time necessary to focus on making the newsletter good, or, at least, “largely coherent.” If my writing has been educational, or informative, or vaguely entertaining, please consider subscribing. At $5/month or $50/year it comes out to about one beer ever four weeks.

Over the weekend the Russian billionaire Pavel Durov, founder of the globally popular chat app Telegram (and, before it, the Russian Facebook clone VKontakte), was arrested in France, and subsequently charged “with complicity in managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions by an organized group,” as well as “complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud.”

Telegram, if you’re not familiar with it--and if you’re an American with no interest in cryptocurrency you probably aren’t--is a WhatsApp-like chat app that features both standard direct and group messages and also “broadcast” channels, in which a specific person or group of people can broadcast messages to large numbers of subscribers. In India, Brazil, Indonesia, Ukraine, and other countries with high incidences of Telegram usage, it is (like WhatsApp) effectively both a chat app and a news app. In Russia, it is the de facto official app for military communications.

The media and Twitter discourse around Durov’s arrest has tended to view it through the lens of “free speech,” “content moderation,” platform liability, etc. One reason this has come to be seen as a “free speech” issue is the political valence of Telegram’s user base here in the U.S., where it has long been the preferred chat app of crypto degenerates and the associated and adjacent get-rich-quick schemers and scammers.¹ (In an excellent piece on package-return “refunding” scams, much of the evidence of which comes from Telegram, Ezra Marcus describes it as “the anonymous chat app on which much contemporary fraud is coordinated.”)

More recently it’s become the partisan-sorted chat app of choice for the Muskian right. 404 Media has a good explanation of how and why this happened, but the basic explanation is that the widely accepted gold standard of “encrypted chat apps”--the heavily audited and nonprofit-administered Signal--was deemed dangerous to free-thinking patriots by Chris Rufo due to the presence of unacceptably woke NPR President Katherine Maher on the Signal’s board of directors. Durov, sensing an opportunity, promoted Telegram as a truly safe alternative, though evidence of Signal’s supposed vulnerabilities is scant, and claims that Telegram’s security is better are dubious. In April, Durov was a guest on Tucker Carlson’s YouTube show, the only interview he’s given in the last decade.

“Free speech” is the core political belief and main rallying cry for this crew, and so naturally Durov’s arrest was understood in those terms. “His ‘crime’ appears to be enabling free speech online,” tweeted court intellectual Balaji Srinivasan. Carlson put it even more dramatically: “It wasn’t Putin who arrested him for allowing the public to exercise free speech… a living warning to any platform owner who refuses to censor the truth at the behest of governments and intel agencies.”

For the most part critics and columnists have effectively accepted this framing, digging up some of the horrible, criminal stuff Telegram has hosted and enabled--“Telegram’s Pavel Durov built a haven for free speech — and child predators”--and lecturing readers about the “limits of free speech.”

The other reason that “free speech” has become the main prism through which Durov’s arrest is viewed is that it’s a familiar one. The main framework through which many people (journalists in particular) have processed social networks and internet platforms over the last several years is as a species of “media company.” Arguments about free speech, legal liability, and content moderation follow naturally from an understanding of these companies like Telegram and its rivals as mainly communications networks, publishers, and broadcasters.

But there are also limits to the “media company” as an analogy to explain them, or to understand their place in the world. More newsy coverage of Durov’s arrest has seemed to imply that the complaint underlying the specific charges is less the content viewable on Telegram and more his and his company’s unwillingness to assist French (and European) law enforcement in tracking down the people posting it, as the Times writes:

Telegram has played a role in multiple criminal cases in France tied to child sexual abuse, drug trafficking and online hate crimes, but has shown a “near-total absence” of response to requests for cooperation from law enforcement, Ms. Beccuau said.

Prosecutors around France, as well as legal authorities in Belgium and other European countries, “have shared the same observation,” she said, leading organized-crime prosecutors to open an investigation in February on the “potential criminal liability of executives at this messaging platform.”

If you accept this reporting of events, I suppose in somewhat indirect sense Durov’s arrest is a “free speech” issue, but it’s not really a “censorship” issue, as Carlson would have it.

In fact, other reporting elsewhere suggests that there’s more going on here even than “failure to assist law enforcement.” Following Durov’s arrest, The Wall Street Journal reported on his interesting relationship with the French government and with French President Emanuel Macron:

At the lunch in 2018, which hasn’t been previously reported, Macron invited the Russian-born Durov to move Telegram to Paris, people familiar with the discussions said. Durov declined at the time. The French leader even discussed granting French citizenship to him, one of the people said. A French official said Durov asked Macron for citizenship. […]

In 2017, the year before the meeting with Macron, French spies targeted Durov in a joint operation with the United Arab Emirates that hacked his iPhone, according to people familiar with the matter. The spy operation, which also hasn’t been previously reported, was code-named “Purple Music,” the people said. French security officials were acutely concerned about Islamic State’s use of Telegram to recruit operatives and plan attacks. […]

Despite the 2018 visit with Macron, French authorities long viewed Telegram with suspicion. A former French intelligence official from France’s General Directorate for Internal Security said that compromising Telegram had been a long-term effort of the country’s spy services but didn’t comment on the hacking operation against Durov. 

Hmm. Hmm! In his interview with Carlson, Durov described the attention he and his company received from the F.B.I. when he was in the U.S.:

In the U.S. we got too much attention from the F.B.I., the security agencies, whenever we came to the U.S. So, to give you an example, last time I was in the U.S., I brought an engineer that is working for Telegram and there was an attempt to secretly hire my engineer behind my back by cyber security officers or agents, whatever they are called… to write code for them or to break into Telegram, they were curious to learn which open-source libraries are integrated to the Telegram's app, you know, on the client's side and they were trying to persuade him to use certain open-source tools that he would then integrate into Telegram's code that in my understanding would serve as back doors [for] the U.S. government, or maybe any other government, because a back door is a back door. […]

Whenever I would go to the U.S. I would have two F.B.I. agents greeting me at the airport, asking questions. One time I was having my breakfast at 9:00 a.m. and the FBI showed up my house that I was renting […] they were interested to learn more about Telegram. They knew I left Russia, they knew what we were doing, but they wanted details, and my understanding is that they wanted to establish a relationship to, in a way, control Telegram better.

“Control” there is an ambiguous verb, I admit, but given the context I am not sure that it’s meant as a synonym for “censor.” It sounds a lot less like the F.B.I. was concerned with free speech on Telegram (or with specific criminality) and a lot more like they were concerned with figuring out how they could get a piece of the action.

And why not? Telegram claims to have 900 million monthly active users. Many of those users will have signed up for the chat app because of its claims to be a “secure messenger”--dissidents, military operatives, criminals, and other people who have a pressing need for private communications. But Telegram’s person-to-person chats are by default unencrypted (its group chats are impossible to encrypt), and the encryption it does offer is awkward and difficult to use. As the cryptographer Matthew Green writes: “The practical impact is that the vast majority of one-on-one Telegram conversations — and literally every single group chat — are probably visible on Telegram’s servers, which can see and record the content of all messages sent between users.” It also collects and stores a great deal of personal information about the people who use its app--including, for example, the groups they belong to and the people they talk to.

This does not sound much like a media company to me! It sounds more like … an intelligence agency. And running a nominally independent for-profit intelligence agency out of Dubai, with some amount of data on 900 million people, including a huge number of militants, mobsters, and revolutionaries, is likely to be a much more interesting operation to state actors than merely running a broadcasting company where Tucker Carlson can share his latest interviews--not to mention a much more dangerous proposition for your freedom.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Telegram was an spook cut-out, or a state surveillance scheme. (Though… look, I’m not saying it’s not, either.) I’m using the analogy as a way to establish the proper domain in which we should probably be thinking about Telegram--as well as, of course, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Google, and every other billion-user business that relies heavily on gathering user data as part of its business model.

Understood this way, the arrest is probably less about “free speech” and more about an increasingly securitized and de-globalized internet. Durov’s problem ultimately was that he attempted to operate his vast surveillance machine--one with enormous intelligence value--with one foot in France and the other in Russia (and then another foot in Dubai and a fourth foot in St. Kitts & Nevis), when states increasingly demand strict fealty from their domiciled technology businesses, and are increasingly paranoid about technology businesses from geopolitcal rivals.

1. Full disclosure: I am in precisely one Telegram group chat (the one started by my most crypto-curious friend), provided you don’t count the multiple crypto-scam groups to which I am unwillingly added every month.

My life in the Telegram Bitcoin scam group chat of ghosts