By Slobodan Despot
The owner of Telegram, as far as we know, is still in France. The bird without a nest now lives with a police ankle tag on its foot. It is still unclear why he himself landed in the trap set. But we are beginning to understand how he thinks. The intelligence services too, no doubt.
More than thirty years ago, when he was living in Paris, Edward Limonov gave me a very valuable piece of advice: ‘Do whatever you want, but avoid making out with the French police. They are the toughest bastards.’ Limonov had been expelled from the USSR before landing in the New York underground, so he knew a bit about police in many places.
Limonov was not only a political punk, but also a very good writer. In his collection of short stories about Russia in decay that we had published in French (La sentinelle assassinée, ed. L’Age d’Homme), he dissected the anatomy of certain Russian illusions about the West. A piece named ‘A Tragedy of Ignorance’ delivered the burlesque and heartbreaking story of the exodus of a family of Soviet musicians who had enjoyed great success playing jazz. Drunk with glory, they had convinced themselves that it was nothing to succeed in Russia if one did not succeed in America. In the homeland of jazz! The unfortunate people did not know where they were setting foot. America is a stage where standing ovations are paid at the price of blood. Fooled by promises without cover, rushed into tours as exhausting as they were low-paying, they had ended up crashing in a poorly maintained plane.
Limonov would have done better to address his warning to the founder of Telegram, but would the Chevalier du Rove have listened to it? Anyway, the bird without a nest now lives with a police ankle tag on its foot. Unless otherwise indicated, he has not tried to flee his new homeland where he faces twenty years in prison. Around the world, there is speculation about the reasons and the behind-the-scenes story of his arrest.
His personality interests us in two ways. Both as a product and illustration of a certain mentality specific to the westernized Russian intelligentsia, and as a geopolitical factor because Pavel Durov is the sole owner – at least that’s what he claims – of the most coveted internet messaging service in the world.
A conspiracy against freedom of expression?
Last May, Tucker Carlson travelled to Dubai to record a very captivating interview with Durov. That was mainly about the fight against censorship, the independence of ideas and freedom of movement, and the best way to resist the global Leviathan. Perhaps Carlson had oriented the interview according to his own domestic political imperatives, where the fight against Democratic media censorship plays a central role. In any case, this interview undoubtedly contributed to imposing a certain ‘reading’ of the Parisian incident.
After the captive, let’s take a look at the jailer.
Since the Gilets Jaunes revolt, the French state has established for itself a solid reputation as an enemy of freedoms. It is from France, in particular, that the largest number of blocking requests to Twitter came before it was taken over by Elon Musk. The Macronian apparatchik Thierry Breton, France’s nominee as European Commissioner, exported this Orwellian craze to the European Union with extravagant high-handedness until he was disavowed by the Eurocrats themselves. Macron and his henchmen had set a trap for the new Julian Assange to gag him and his network. The accusation of complicity in paedophilia or terrorism was just their alibi. It was that simple.
Maybe. But there are also less romantic ways of looking at events.
On the edge of the Dark Web
Apart from the accusations listed by the Parisian Prosecutor’s office, Telegram’s Western critics point the finger at the proliferation of scams and dubious trafficking in the application’s channels. This is the inevitable backlash of the principle of non-interference: the shield that guarantees the private sphere protects virtue just as vice. As Durov wants it, or promotes it, Telegram allows both the work of Uzbek fraudsters and the subversion of hostile governments by the CIA or the transmission of illegal orders to law enforcement agencies by French prefects or the presidency.
One might have thought – Durov perhaps believed it – that in the night all the cats are gray and that everyone has had something to gain from Telegram. The advantages of the tool compensated for the disadvantages, at least on the Russian side, since the application has continued to spread through the official agencies despite the conflict with its owner.
+ Nota. This fact, as well as some aspects of the financing of the application, led the Americans to suspect Telegram of secret collusion with the Russian state. This suspicion is not to be dismissed casually among the reasons for the arrest.
But this is to reckon with the growing irrationality of decision-makers in the Western world. An irrationality that pushes them more and more, as the controls of the world escape them, to want to fix their grip on what they cannot control – or whose control would bring them nothing. In this case, as I have pointed out before, it would be the encryption protocol itself, and not some particular data, that would interest them. The French President’s alleged ingenuity in declaring that this was a purely judicial matter convinced no one, least of all Régis de Castelnau, a seasoned analyst of the French judiciary, who assured me that an operation of this scale could not have taken place without a political green light. And the French authorities, as I pointed out earlier, would probably not have acted without the backing or even the encouragement of the Americans.
We must clearly understand the issue of Telegram’s encryption. If the French intelligence service had access to the central algorithm – but is that even possible? – this would mean that military communications, in particular, which use this vector could be intercepted. This would directly result in the death of men and the destruction of equipment – until the military would become aware of the leak and change their communication protocols.
+ Nota. Or maybe not. Meta-owned WhatsApp is a fully encrypted messaging service, except that the Israeli-American services notoriously have a ‘backdoor’. This is what would have allowed the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas negotiator, in Tehran on July 31, 2024. (We may wonder how people with similar exposures can still trust their smartphones, but that’s another matter.)
The French authorities have revealed that Durov snubbed more than two thousand requests for legal information. We learn from the press that the DGSE (Directorate-General for External Security) had even gone to visit him in Dubai to obtain his cooperation. He would therefore have applied the same policy to them as towards Russia after the adoption of the 2018 law obliging the platform to hand over personal data when requested by the security services.
Hostage situation?
Despite his refusal, Durov has visited Russia several times until 2021 without being worried. In his mind, France, his new homeland – mother of democracy! – could not be more tyrannical than his motherland, the empire of Tsar Vladimir. This is what he was wrong about, like many Russian liberals. He could also have suspected, moreover, that the particular cases were not the main issue, but only a prelude.
Under the pretext that he did not want to deliver certain locked contents, they would have grabbed him in order to obtain the keys to the safe. It would therefore be a question of a hostage taking aimed, undoubtedly, to put pressure on his collaborators, and above all his brother Nikolai. However, the programmer lives in Russia, so he himself is potentially a hostage of the other party. France has also issued an arrest warrant for him, so he is not about to leave his country. All in all it’s a stalemate situation, as you would say in chess.
If the Western services wanted to put the network under control, publicly arresting its owner is not the best idea: it’s like throwing a stone into the trout pond at the same time as the hook. The Telegram team immediately has taken countermeasures, and some governments have issued directives to their officials. Such an operation can only be done under cover. Moreover, if the objective is to have an ear on famously secretive conversations, the intrusion cannot be retroactive: in principle, they are not stored anywhere.
And so to speak rationally – but here’s the catch: are Macron and his subordinates in this case rational? – this version of what’s happened does not hold up to scrutiny. Irrationally, it does – hubris and a coup to prove that we, the French government, can do this, and it’s just too bad if in passing, we break the toy.
A missed spacewalk?
In a manner of speaking, the toy was broken at the moment its owner was detained. The question of trust in the tool has become central now, not only for governments, mafiosi and ordinary users, but also for the financial circles surrounding Telegram and also its peers and competitors.
Now here is yet another take on the story: Durov’s IPO plans.
After listening to the Carlson interview with Durov, you can confirm that we never hear the word ‘war’ mentioned. This was the elephant in the room – so large in fact that we can’t even see it. This encourages the interpretation that Durov used Carlson to advertise a money affair involving the other app billionaires whom Durov insisted on calling by their first names, as if they are friends and collaborators who collectively assure the market that Durov’s and Telegram’s financial probity as solid as Jack Dorsey’s and Elon Musk’s Twitter/X or Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta.
Top: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, then chief executive of Twitter, participate from different locations in a public discussion on cryptocurrencies in July 2021. Bottom: Musk testifying with Mark Zuckerberg at a closed US Senate hearing in September 2023. Although Durov claims to have met Dorsey and refers to both Dorsey and Musk by their first names, there are no published photographs of Durov with either of them.
Everything Durov says indicates that he is fully aware of this, but he keeps repeating the litany of ‘freedom of expression’, ‘free competition’, ‘free markets’, ‘hope’, etc. This indicates to me that he is a Russian interested only in marketing his ‘product’ for the maximum amount of money he can draw in advance, then a maximum rate of return. He thinks that the American ‘system’ is his model – he describes the ‘efficiency’ of his own management as ‘like a Navy SEALs team’. A comparison that seems designed to tempt American ears.
In fact, at the time of his arrest, Pavel Durov was preparing Telegram’s initial public offering (IPO), aiming for a highly ambitious valuation of 30 billion dollars. From the ‘Robin Hood’ atmosphere of the Dubai meeting, we are suddenly transported to the cold, efficient backdrop of Wall Street.
However, this entry into the market, apart from being somewhat at odds with the values of sobriety, simplicity and confidentiality of the man who sees himself as the pioneer of an anti-system, did not go without a hitch. Telegram’s business model does not seem very clearly defined. Last year, the platform recorded a loss of $108 million on revenues of $342 million. It was also noted that 40% of this revenue came from crypto services, a flow that remains at the mercy of the whims of legislation that is still very fluid in this area.
The Financial Times concludes that Telegram is in fact ‘a crypto firm with a sideline in messaging’. This is not true for the moment, but it does add another twist to the ‘reading’ of events. Clearly, Durov, like Elon Musk, must be haunted by the model of WeChat, the all-purpose application that has replaced wallets and credit cards – but which is, of course, an instrument of the Chinese state. What use would its thirty billion in capitalization be, if not to take a stratospheric leap? And find itself in an orbit – that of crypto and decentralized payments – where governments are defending tooth and nail their outdated claim to mint and control money.
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Durov/Du Rove thought he was a citizen of the world and expressed libertarian views in line with that. According to him, statism was the enemy, and Russia embodied this anachronism. He has now had time, in his four days of jail, to revise his convictions. The death of the ‘citizen of the world’ and of the free zone necessary for his unfettered development is already one of the lessons of this case. But its repercussions go far beyond that. To speak plainly, the Telegram case concentrates the crucial strategic issues of the time we are going through.
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