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Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France
(www.tf1info.fr)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
What crimes did he personally commit?
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.
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.
Also they use a custom encryption protocol that had bugs that look like a backdoor. https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/113020871978942265
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.