This will be an interesting case to watch — I don’t believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort — but generally my understanding is that harassment on border entry has been the order of the day, rather than arrests.

But that’s what exactly they want no? EU is literally implementing a regulation that will allow to “circumvent end-to-end encryption to address child sexual abuse material”. I believe it failed to pass recently, but they will try again – and nothing stops countries to implement it independently. I think France is the one who was pushing for that in the first place.

> Telegram has been used by protesters in places like Hong Kong, Belarus, Kazakhstan, even in Barcelona back in the day. It’s been a tool for the opposition to a large extent. But it doesn’t really matter whether it’s opposition or the ruling party that is using Telegram. For us, we apply the rules equally to all sides. We don’t become prejudiced in this way.

> It’s not that we are rooting for the opposition or we are rooting for the ruling party. It’s not that we don’t care, but we think it’s important to have this platform that is neutral to all voices because we believe that the competition of different ideas can result in progress and a better world for everyone.. You don’t want to be geopolitically aligned. You don’t want to select the winners in any of these political fights.

He’d have you believe that all messages are welcome on Telegram, that no material is censored, that it’s all about free expression, that they’re too small to provide moderation.

But when an account is flagged for spam, Telegram rapidly responds and restricts or kills the account. So they can and do moderate content.

It’s just that accounts can get flagged for CSAM hundreds of times and Telegram takes no action.

They’re making a choice to provide a platform for this material. That’s against the law and prison time is absolutely justified.

In my experience it’s the channel’s admins who respond, not Telegram’s.

If that’s the case then CSAM not getting actioned is probably just channel admins allowing content that they approve of.

> the operators of the messenger app Telegram have released user data to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in several cases. According to SPIEGEL information, this was data from suspects in the areas of child abuse and terrorism. In the case of violations of other criminal offenses, it is still difficult for German investigators to obtain information from Telegram, according to security circles.

Signal and Telegram were publicly sparring in May 2024, https://threema.ch/en/blog/posts/chat-apps-government-ties-a…

> two popular chat services have accused each other of having undisclosed government ties. According to Signal president Meredith Whittaker, Telegram is not only “notoriously insecure” but also “routinely cooperates with governments behind the scenes.” Telegram founder Pavel Durov, on the other hand, claims that “the US government spent $3 million to build Signal’s encryption” and Signal’s current leaders are “activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad.”

A tip is that whenever you reach a ludicrous conclusion “they do nothing to stop underage violence”, it’s probably your analysis that is ludicrous and not the object being analyzed.

“How has a peaceful European country ended up the gun murder capital of the EU?”
“Things got so bad that the government called in the army to help the police. And there’s a new deadly trend emerging in this battle. Gang members as young as 14 are increasingly using explosives to target rivals as they fight over drug turfs. “

It’s a bizarre lie, not the least because it so obviously does not hold up to even the most basic scrutiny.

There’s no scenario where a third party has compromised your phone without Apple’s collaboration, which is the only scenario where the secure enclave would maybe protect you (and even then, the bad actor would just read your messages off the screen or memory directly).

> I don’t believe there are any western nations that want non-locally-backdoored messaging of any sort

means

> I believe every western nation wants all messaging to be locally-backdoored

There are two legistive bodies in the EU, one is only allowed to propose law, the other is only allowed to vote on it.

Lots of braindead laws get put to a vote, theres no requirement that they get through.

I understand that raising the alarm is helpful, but it would be helpful if people took a second to understand how the EU works, the politicians involved and how their motions are perceived by the rest of parliament.

Which would be pedantry if it weren’t that one of the two chambers is much more in line with the former

Which every company does more or less. The fact that Telegram doesn’t reach this extremely low, very low bar is quite something.

This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France’s privacy destroying authorities.

Of course, such legislation only has any chance in hell of improving lives if the standard of living for children, the education, the … IN social services is good. It is very easy to see this WILL put more children into such a situation, and that’s about the only thing such legislation will definitely do. It is completely absurd to think this is going to end drugs, abuse or whatever else they’re looking for.

Is that the case? Is it the case that the standard of living, education, … in social services is good?

No. Not at all. There’s constant scandals and if a child that gets into a social services institution makes it into university, just one, any given year, that’s national news. Prostitution in social services is common, drugs and crime are everywhere.

It seems there is A LOT more work to be done on the other side of social services first. They seem to perform VERY badly once they actually catch someone. So why do this? Because it isn’t to help children. At the very best they see this as a cheap way to look like they’re improving social services.

It lays bare that their motivation is blanket surveillance for their own political ends and nothing to do with protecting children in the slightest.

Social Services are one of the most consistently underfunded and under-resources arms of government.

Australia has recently had to “increase the bar” at which mandatory reporting is required because the resources don’t exist to even consider investigation of cases where the child’s life isn’t in immediate danger.

It’s gross, but it seems politics around the world has found it’s shared water level, and that level is happy with exploiting exploited children.

This is definitely a “grass is always greener” situation.

It’s clear the EU’s mindset is “nobody can compromise your privacy except me, but it’s OK, I’m benevolent”, and I’m not a fan of that exceptions.

I keep bringing it up since people forget about it: in 2006 the EU adopted the Data Retention Directive that forced all ISPs to save the browsing history of everyone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

It was eventually declared invalid by the European court of human rights, but it was still in effect for many years. Countries that did not implement this (eg Romania because their constitutional court found it illegal) were sued by the EU commission.

The EU’s attempts to spy on people go back decades. You’ll also note that government gets exemptions from all the privacy stuff the EU pushes.

I hope the EU changes course on this, but as with their handling of other tech… I’m not holding my breath.

> Declassified American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement.

> The documents confirm suspicions voiced at the time that America was working aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into a European state. One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.

> The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington’s main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.

> The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA’s first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement’s funds.

https://www.quora.com/Was-the-European-Union-a-CIA-project

Jail them, fire them is a pretty common demand on the left and right.

And fo be fair not everyone can surveillance the whole Internet like the US do or can enforce local laws worldwide.

Things like like the CloudAct and
FISA section 702.

Not to mention that free speech sounds good, but you still can get fired and lose your income and health insurance.

So it’s free speech for people like Musk and many others self censor their posts.

Nonsense. Of course Europeans value those things, but they’re also mindful of the fact that such freedoms can be abused, sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

In general, remember that villains almost always justify their action as necessary or just- only in movies their stated motive is obviously egoistical.

But the people repeating sickening corporate PR and marketing crap there making me nauseous. It’s 100x more fake than Facebook. I really hate it.

If it’d be banned I could do without it because nobody would have it.

I really hate that kind of corporate evangelisation. If it didn’t exist I wouldn’t have to take part in it, that’s all.

The company I work for is the same. We were one of the last to close our Russian offices when the war started. They say they’re committed to LGBTIQ+ rights yet do huge business in Saudi and the rest of the middle east (and don’t even display the rainbow banners on our site there). The C-Suite say they care about sustainability yet fly all over the world in private jets.

So that’s why I’m a bit sour about that.

Also hopefully LinkedIn will get banned indeed, or have you already forgotten how Microsoft has been (at least theoretically) illegal for nearly a decade already in the EU, because they were (and most likely still are) complicit with the US government in violating human rights, and that is even before considering the monopoly issues ?

What? Not in the commission. It’s a 100% politically appointed body made up of politicians, it’s just not elected.

Also even on the lower levels being an “expert” EU apparatchik has absolutely nothing to do with dedicated your life to science.

In any case it’s a deeply flawed system, minimum oversight and a lot of money to spend/waste can’t ever lead anywhere good.

My pet tinfoil-hat theory is that he decided that staying in a French prison is safer for him than being out in the open and get some polonium, or whatnot.

Why would he get some polonium? There are endless official Russian state telegram channels. Putin clearly has no issue with it or he would have banned it.

FWIW, France do not extradite its citizen and Pavel Durov is french. He may have been arrested but that doesn’t mean he will stay in detention depending on the nature of the charge and his eventual cooperation. Who knows, maybe he called before landing in France so that he was arrested and seen as cooperative.

Despite what the article says, Telegram is not even a nominally end-to-end encrypted platform. You need to jump through hoops to get end-to-end encryption on the platform.

It’s really chilling to see the steps EU gobs are taking against free speech. In some ways they seem more authoritarian than even China and Russia. It’s like “free world” is becoming a farce.

Considering how he’s tarnished Signal, there is absolutely no reason for them or anyone else to back him up.

What will be very funny is the fact that Telegram is pretty much not encrypted (yeah ok, “secret chats”, whatever sure) and now that investigators probably have access to Durov’s phone, that lack of encryption might come back to bite him in the ass. Can’t wait to know what they find and if they do find something, it might be interesting to see if he finally changes his stance.

If you don’t uphold the principles all you have to do is wait until it bites you too.

What happened to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Mandatory phone number exposure? (or did they finally implement usernames?)

A joke of a “registration lock pin” instead a proper 2FA to protect against sim-swap?

Yes, that includes people from Russia, China or the US believing they are the ones who are truly free, and everything else are totalitarian shitholes. Each one of them is even kind of right in their own regard.

Speculative. We don’t know why he is in jail. Maybe his lawyers know why, maybe not. Maybe the prosecutor knows, maybe not. We don’t know if there’s a case. There’s hardly anything we do know.

My take is he doesn’t reply to LE requests related to CSAM. That is one of the few things we (as in: our governments) don’t like anywhere in the world, and Telegram is known to respond slowly to (such) requests. But I won’t pretend I know for sure. Cause either way, it is a neat honeypot compared to technically better protocols.

First, your analogy is broken — roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.

Second, you propose your preferred moral economy as one that only curtails harms. In fact, you create another harm implementing what you think is right.

Reasonable people disagree about which is worse — the creation and public support of a technocratic oligarchy in control of how humans communicate or the proliferation of some harms that take advantage of unfettered communication. But please don’t be simple minded, pretending to yourself or others that there aren’t real costs, social and physical, on both sides of this.

For myself, I think private communications are a human right and a massive good for society, and I don’t condone criminal acts undertaken using messaging.

It is not just that. Weapons. Drugs. Terrorism (1). Pornography depicting rape.

(1) Includes accelerationism. France just had a terrorist attack on a synagogue. Germany had one on a city festival. Could be related to either. We don’t know!

And yet, with all above being said, as much of a cesspool Telegram is, I much rather have such centralized there than in an application with group E2E encryption. But even then, every once in a while you want to scare the herd to demotivate their (criminal) effort, just be careful not to flock them to a better alternative. Which is a real risk.

and they’re usually public property and policed. Routine police inspection on a road and in particular control of borders and key nodes in your transportation infrastructure isn’t exactly controversial. (unless you’re part of some extreme political faction). You know a lot of countries where people can drive without a license plate?

Private communication is important but it has always had limits, this crypto mentality of companies exercising no compliance, having no borders, ignoring the law and national security doesn’t have a precedent. Historically people communicated say in the US using an American telecommunications network which without a doubt complied with legal requests. It’s not at all self evident that we should tolerate telecoms infrastructure operated by a Russian out of Dubai that is primarily used by an enemy we’re effectively at war with.

And no, putting company’s in charge of your privacy isn’t a solution, if they can be compelled to give away your communication history then they’ll abuse it. Have you not learned anything from the Snowden leaks?

And it’s not true that with electronic communication you either get full privacy or none. You can have end-to-end encrypted messages with unencrypted metadata, so that when police observe a message implicating the sender in a crime (e.g. on an arrested suspect’s phone) they can get a search warrant for the IP address or phone number associated with that account and then visit the owner in person to look at the messages on their phone. This doesn’t allow police to read everyone’s messages all the time undetected, but does allow them to read specific people’s messages if they get a warrant.

Since Telegram doesn’t only have unencrypted metadata but also plenty of unencrypted messages, there must’ve been many cases where a search warrant would’ve yielded lots of useful information. If Telegram didn’t properly respond to all warrants, it seems fair to launch an investigation.

“roads, telephones, pen and paper, motor vehicles all fit your description just as aptly.”

All of those can be monitored by the government, even your letters could be.

There is a principle in the free world that one is not criminally liable for the speech of others. This is the principle that allows ISP’s, newspapers, web forums, Google, etc. etc. to exist. You demand that the principle be violated and the Internet be destroyed. I disagree.

Because we want to, and we can. I don’t get how HN consistently fails to understand the actual social and political process by which regulations are made. I constantly see this argument which effectively boils down to “if you ban a thing, you will also need to ban everything else, which is absurd, so you shouldn’t ban anything”. But in real life we can choose what we ban. Everything is a trade-off; we can choose to ban something if the harm it creates is considered to outweigh its benefit to society.

It is open to society to decide that Telegram is more proximate to the harm being caused, and less otherwise socially useful, than an ISP, and on that basis punish the former but not the latter. (It is also reasonable to argue that Telegram is not sufficiently proximate to the harm and that it is sufficiently socially useful that it should be allowed to operate, and honestly I sympathise with that argument more. But my point is that it is a matter of weighing social harm vs benefit and not just a technical analysis of “where the bits go”.)

If you get caught driving a getaway car for an armed robber, you are going to jail. Arguing “ah, but by that logic you’ll also have to jail the guy who sold the robber his breakfast” isn’t going to cut it, and rightly so.

Bad analogy.

Better one is that your a taxi driver and someone who committed a crime hops into your car for a ride, then you’re found guilty by association.

Don’t have to like it but the law is the law.

With more or less success, sure, but they can at least say there is an attempt and they do take down stuff. Durov pretty much brags about not doing the bare minimum.

It’s that simple.

I am sure all those claims in the media about “cooperating with terrorists” is just a lie. Probably it is something related to not implementing fingerprints for copyrighted material.

It might be different in other places but here, in a large city of continental Europe, Telegram is definitely little more than an enabler for illegal activities.

The victim of drugs is the whole society. It’s only “victimless” in an absolutely individualistic environment, which I wouldn’t even call a “society”.

But none of this contradicts my initial comment. Telegram is a straight enabler of illegal activities.

There are other ways to capture and ensnare criminals. Sacrificing our privacy for the “greater good” is a bridge too far.

As one counter point, think about all of the completely fine human behaviors that instantly become kompromat when the powers have access to your every communication. That is way more dangerous to democracy, freedom, and liberty than a slightly smaller chance of “not protecting the children”.

Besides, if we actually cared so much about children, we wouldn’t let them not get school lunches, we wouldn’t sell them on gambling and gacha games, and we’d do a much better job of educating them.

> Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

— A committee which included Benjamin Franklin

_____________

That said, this quote is typically misused, or at best being used wayyy outside its original context. (0)

The Penn family, the local semi-nobility of Pennsylvania, are offering the government a one-time “donation”… in exchange for getting a perpetual exemption from all taxes.

A committee of elected representatives–among them Franklin–are strongly opposed to it, since they believe the democratic legislature’s “essential Liberty” to impose taxes for its citizens is way more important than any “temporary Safety” of a one-time lump sum.

(0) https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-06-02-01…

That phrase has a life of its own, and has stood the test of time.

When someone says that e=mc2, do you feel a need to make sure everyone knows the ‘context’ that Einstein took credit for some of his wife’s work?

When someone quotes Gandhi to say “Be the change that you wish to see in the world”, do you talk about him sleeping in a bed with his niece?

By the way, if you live in the West then your comfortable lifestyle is based on the work of slaves of various degrees. From forced prison laborers in America to cobalt and lithium miners in Africa, to actual full-on slave markets in Libya because tptb didn’t like how un-exploitable the country was getting. We’re all hypocrites, and pointing that out when it’s not relevant just derails discussion.

Btw, Ben Franklin became an abolitionist later in life. He was elected as the president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery around 1785.

They do know how to respond to copyright complaints. Not so much about other, far more serious sort of illegal activities. Just on that point, they should have expected something to be done against them.

For fun, I tried that and was unsuccessful, at least in the allotted time.

Google turned up many third-party references to illegal activity on Telegram, but that’s not the same thing.

Search for any of these phrases and it will return tons of channels to join:

– Combo lists
– Check fraud
– Redline Stealer
– Bank logs

There are tens of thousands of channels on Telegram w illegal content and material.

I really do hope they dont shut it down bc it’s an extremely valuable asset in terms of intelligence and monitoring criminals haha

Source: I work in CTI and actively monitor and scan thousands of Telegram channels.

I used python and the Telethon and Pyrogram frameworks to help scrape and monitor em.

A paid Telegram account can be in 1k channels/groups. A free Telegram account can be in 500 channels/groups.

Good luck and happy programming!

Tbh given both those apps company’s have dealings with gov in aus I’m gonna say signals probably already got a backdoor into em. If you don’t think so you don’t know aus law well enough or who signals are.

Also the owners of the apps aren’t liable for the content of the conversations. Their liable for providing a platform for the conversation to take place and for not knowingly taking available efforts to curb criminal activity on that platfor/service. It’s like hey I’m gonna rent you a store house to hide all your illegal drugs in Mr gang member. I’m not doing the hiding or anything but I’m assisting the activity by providing the store house. I could make efforts to curb such activity like you know doing a rental inspection once every six months but I choose not to and turn a blind eye. Am I assisting a crime or am I completely innocent? Now repeat this but telegram is the store house.

The fact that it was wound back by the head of the EU’s executive branch – Breton’s boss – demoted the statement to “the opinion of the commissioner”.

> Breton is empowered to oversee enforcement of the DSA and can communicate independently with companies.

So maybe he didn’t need to get permission from anyone to send the letter.

It’s not on by default, works only between 2 devices, they both have to be online at the same time and you can’t access anything from the web. And group chats don’t support it at all. Private chats are not end to end encrypted by default and it’s actually quite clumsy to encrypt them so almost nobody uses it.

It’s really weird that Telegram is singled out like this.

As a result, it doesn’t respond to authorities because it doesn’t have to. However, this approach is unsustainable and unacceptable for many governments, both in the East and the West. That’s why he’s being accused in France: he is not “cooperating with law enforcement”.

Or it could be that he has French citizenship; subject to French law. Spreading your infrastructure across legal jurisdiction doesn’t make you stateless – it just ensures you’re subject to the laws of each jurisdiction you operate in.

I don’t think that’s accurate. Like any other business, he collects money from the Western users, so that’s one easy choke point. He is also fully accountable to Apple, otherwise he can forget about 1.5 billion Iphone users forever. (apparently, he also just seems to enjoy visiting France and other countries he decided to go against)

wasn’t he bragging that he operates with like a dozen people or something. I can also see him just punting on many kinds of moderation (outside of the kind that helps running the service), because it’s a lot of subjective, dirty work and an army of people.

It’s really easy for e.g. a drugdealer to post QR codes or something on lamp posts with their contact and then they can invite people. Making Telegram go away is just going to hide the problem, not solve it.

I will admit I am confused. I can only assume something else is at play.

edit: The only thing I can think of is that there some rather gruesome channels showing Russia/Ukraine, Palestine/Israel toll. I wonder if it was decided that general population should not have access to these.

(1) https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651

We don’t trust proprietary stuff because we’ve been burned by it, if there’s an open standard, even a worse one: use it.

If it’s really that bad, we need to improve the standard.

You connect from any compatible client; and the effort that has gone in to the Mail client for iOS means it’s a decent enough mail client for non-iCloud mail accounts too.

Apples closed ecosystem is mostly its developer tooling and iMessage.

I wouldn’t. I don’t trust Apple hardware or software, and I don’t see why anyone who cares about these issues ever would. But fortunately Telegram runs on devices and OSes from a wide range of suppliers, many of which might be less open to the influences that apply to Apple.

If your rationale against first-party backdoors relies on this logic, then you’re in for a really big surprise when you read the Snowden leaks.

Most use normal chats.

With anonymous accounts, using anonymous +888 numbers, whose price has increased from $16 to $1000+ in a matter of a year, it is indeed a very convenient playground for all sorts of activities.

BTW, install your own XMPP server and use OMEMO-compatible clients – Conversations on Android, Gajim on desktop – and you get to have access to non-surveilled (1)communications just like those politico’s.

(1) assuming that your client and server devices remain uncompromised, not a given if you happen to be a high-value target. Caveat emptor.

Simultaneously, they need a light shone on their private lives for the same reason they want to do that to the rest of us: to make sure they’re not abusing their access to sensitive information, getting blackmailed, or otherwise being nefarious.

I have absolutely no idea how to fix this apparent paradox. Perhaps it can’t be done. Even if it can, tech is unstable and this is all a moving target — the way GenAI is going, I suspect that we’ll all have to carry always-on cameras that log and sign everything just to prove we didn’t do whatever some picture or video shows us doing.

Yeah good luck with that :’)

PS: A change to “guilty until proven innocent” policy would require a serious constitutional change in most countries.

Indeed, though there I was thinking more the court of public opinion which loves hearsay and rumour.

The actual law? I have no idea. Tech will change the world before the law can catch up with yesterday.

Why?

Just shoot the case down. It’s stupid, it’s dangerous, and it’s evil.

I don’t want to be interested about it. I don’t want tax money spent on this. I don’t want these nanny-state fascistic technologically illiterate ideas to be legitimized on any level, much less EU wide by people with no accountability for the consequences of their actions.

What might be essential right to human communication might suddenly become “illegal” according to the government.

So there should never ever be, under no circumstances, even the code and infra to be there to provide backdoor/censorships, otherwise it _will_ be abused by limiting people’s communication in the moment they literally need the most.

If the thing they want to delete is run by an entity that has a physical presence in that country, then they — unfortunately — have the right to get that material deleted.

For better or worse, we are all bound by the laws of the place where we physically reside. If we want to do or allow things online that are legal where we are, but are illegal in other countries, then we shouldn’t visit those countries.

It doesn’t matter if anyone “endorses” repressive governments in doing their repressive things; they are legally able to do those things to people physically present within their borders. That’s just the reality of the situation.

France claims Durov allowed stuff that’s illegal in France. He went to France, so France has the ability to punish Durov for his alleged misdeeds. It doesn’t matter if we think that’s right or wrong; that’s just how the world works.

The laws are (usually) defined by the people of a country, based on their idea of morality, and are totally in their right to reject blasphemous stuff or whatever. It’s their home, after all.

The only thing non-negotiable, to me, is that the Declaration of the Human Rights is universal and no law, anywhere, should go against them.

There is no single “Europe”. I have seen many women sunbathing topless in Denmark – it seems to be totally acceptable there. Haven’t seen that in France – but it has a very strong nudist culture dating back at least to the 60s. Some of these nudist beaches are actually famous e.g. Cape d’Agde.

(And btw, I’m unaware of anything that exists that is a ‘spectrum’ apart from the electromagnetic spectrum. To have the quality of being a spectrum, the subject must continuously span a 1-dimensional space. It’s a way overused metaphor, in my opinion, especially for political positions which are anything but 1-dimensional.)

So you correctly identify that modelling it as a one-dimensional spectrum is a gross over-simplification. Then conclude that as it’s not a one-dimensonal spectrum, it must be a binary property? Rather than accepting that reality is more complex than is easily captured in common language?

I can see how you made that interpretation but that’s not what I was saying. Free Speech is an ideal (not a binary property). I doubt that that you will find any human society with a system of laws that puts absolutely no restrictions on speech. That still doesn’t mean that you can talk about Free Speech as a ‘spectrum’. It’s an ideal that ppl strive for, to varying degrees and across different domains. (Perhaps similarly to how Truth is an ideal that ppl strive for; Truth is not a ‘spectrum’.)

It also happens to be an ideal that ppl will vigorously promote in certain domains, while betraying / discarding it in others.

How is a channel “against the law?”

Do you mean access to the channel is creating opportunities for lawlessness that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise? I’m not sure the French justice system has demonstrated that it has exhausted all options other than to handcuff a CEO of one particular platform.

    Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life

    1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private
       and family life, his home and his correspondence.

    2. There shall be no interference by a public authority
        with the exercise of this right except such as is in
        accordance with the law and is necessary in a
        democratic society in the interests of national
        security, public safety or the economic well-being
        of the country, for the prevention of disorder or
        crime, for the protection of health or morals, or
        for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
 

Thus a channel where terror actions are planned /can be made/ “against the law”, but it will not automatically be so, unless there is a specific french law that makes it so.

Please stop being so (seemingly-intentionally) obtuse about this. Certainly the participants of the channel are the ones who incite violence or sell drugs. But some laws also make it illegal to “host” the people who do those sorts of things. A Telegram channel can host these people.

> If France can’t access these channels, how do they know the violence or drugs are actually occurring _in_ France?

They can access those channels.

> And if they could know that, what does Telegram have to do with it?

Telegram is hosting the content, and apparently under French law, the host can also be liable.

> Wouldn’t they just be able to go and arrest the violent person or the drug dealer?

Not if they don’t know where the people are, because Telegram hides their real identities and locations.

I’m not being obtuse, I’m exceptionally uncomfortable with someone rather blithely saying a “channel is against the law.” I’m probing the depths of that. I’m sorry if this is somehow inconvenient to you but I have no intention of altering my behavior and I find it rude that you would even ask in such a way.

> A Telegram channel can host these people.

Is this the majority of users? Is Telegram intentionally marketing it’s services to these users? Does it do internal research to be more appealing to this use case?

> They can access those channels.

So Telegram is not intentionally hiding them from the government or preventing their discovery and infiltration by law enforcement? Then why arrest the CEO?

> and apparently under French law, the host can also be liable.

If you’re comfortable saying “well, it’s legal in France” then what do you hope to gain from further discussion with someone you believe is going to be intentionally obtuse?

> because Telegram hides their real identities and locations.

They are buying drugs? Doesn’t this require two people to meet up and physically exchange goods and money? What good does outlawing the channel do?

Telegram does not do that, and does not shut down the illegal behavior. The problem isn’t that illegal stuff happens on Telegram, the problem is that Telegram won’t help law enforcement when that illegal behavior is found.

They are not; however, required to prevent certain people on a prescribed government list or criteria from owning or using a telephone or from dialing certain numbers.

> won’t help law enforcement

So it’s not because a “channel is against the law.”

If they do observe it, and the platform owners are responsive to taking down illegal content and/or providing information on the participants, then likely law enforcement is satisfied with that.