Free speech in Europe is under attack.
The 39-year-old technology billionaire—founder and CEO of Telegram—Pavel Durov was arrested at the Bourget airport near Paris on Saturday
The arrest prompted on Sunday a warning from Moscow to Paris that Durov should be accorded his rights.
This from humanevents.com.
Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of cooperation with police, a French police source said.
The Daily Mail reported:
Durov had been traveling on his private jet and was targeted by an arrest warrant in France.
He was reportedly arrested around 8 pm local time when he was with his bodyguard.
French outlet TF1 reported that Durov was under threat of a warrant due to the lack of moderation on the Telegram platform. He had arrived straight from Azerbaijan and was arrested after he got off the plane. The outlet reported that he is facing 20 years in prison for alleged offenses including terrorism, narcotic supply, fraud, money laundering, receiving stolen goods, and others.
A source reportedly told TF1:
Pavel Durov will end up in pretrial detention, that’s for sure.
On [Telegram], he allowed an incalculable number of offenses and crimes to be committed, which he did nothing to moderate.
Durov founded Telegram in 2013 along with his brother. The messaging service has 950 million users worldwide and is seen as an uncensored free speech platform. Durov is originally from Russia but has not lived there since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Crimea. In 2014 he said:
I don’t have any business in Russia and have no plans to return there. I have no Russian citizenship anymore.
The tech tycoon lives in Dubai and, again, has dual citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates.
Durov said in April some governments had sought to pressure him:
[B]ut the app should remain a neutral platform and not a player in geopolitics.
However, the UK government has taken issue with Telegram, saying that it allows extremists to use it for criminal means.
The platform offers end-to-end encryption, meaning data can only be accessed by the users. It has calls as well as ‘secret chats’ that focus on the privacy aspect of the platform.
Per Reuters:
The Telegram founder and CEO is estimated to be worth about $15.5 billion.
A cybersecurity gendarmerie unit and France’s national anti-fraud police unit are leading the investigation, that source said, adding that the investigative judge was specialized in organized crime.
Russian lawmaker Maria Butina, who spent 15 months in U.S. prison for acting as an unregistered Russian agent, said:
Durov’s arrest led news bulletins in Russia.
Telegram, based in Dubai, was founded by Durov, who left Russia in 2014 after he refused to comply with demands to shut down opposition communities on his VK social media platform, which he has sold.
The encrypted application, with close to one billion users, is particularly influential in Russia, Ukraine and the republics of the former Soviet Union. It is ranked as one of the major social media platforms after Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat.
Durov came up with the idea of an encrypted messaging app as a way to communicate while he faced pressure in Russia. His younger brother, Nikolai, designed the encryption.
“I would rather be free than to take orders from anyone,” Durov said in April about his exit from Russia and search for a home for his company which included stints in Berlin, London, Singapore, and San Francisco.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said that Durov had misjudged by fleeing Russia and thinking that he would never have to cooperate with the security services abroad.
Russia’s foreign ministry said it had sent a note to Paris demanding access to Durov, although it said that he had French citizenship.
Medvedev, who regularly uses Telegram to criticise and insult the West, said Durov wanted to be a “brilliant ‘man of the world’ who lives wonderfully without a Motherland.”
Medvedev said:
NOTE: Russia began blocking Telegram in 2018 after the app refused to comply with a court order granting state security services access to its users’ encrypted messages.
The action interrupted many third-party services but had little effect on the availability of Telegram there. The ban order, however, sparked mass protests in Moscow and criticism from NGOs.
Telegram said:
Durov has previously accused U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of seeking to get a backdoor into the platform. The FBI has not commented on those allegations.
Telegram’s increasing popularity, however, has prompted scrutiny from several countries in Europe, including France, on security and data breach concerns.
Elon Musk, billionaire owner of X, said after reports of Durov’s detention:
Outside the French embassy in Moscow, a lone protester held up a sign reading:
Final thoughts: Stories like this prove a Trump win over communism/globalism and the Deep State in America will help save the entire world from the Soros et al. designed destruction of civilization.