Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov released a statement late this week addressing the numerous criminal charges that he faces in France after he was arrested there last month.
French authorities detained the 39-year-old Russian billionaire late last month when his private jet landed in the country as part of an investigation into alleged offenses stemming from his refusal to cooperate with law enforcement officials investigating crimes occurring on the encrypted communication platform.
Durov said in a statement that the allegations that he was not complying with law enforcement requests were “surprising” for multiple reasons, including:
- Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement.”
- The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
- If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a simplistic approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.
Durov was charged with complicity in the administration of an online platform that allows organized crime groups to conduct illicit transactions; refusal to cooperate with law enforcement when he is required to by law; complicity in organized fraud, distributing hacking software, child pornography, and illicit drugs; and other crimes.
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He claimed that his company tries to work with governments to strike the right balance between cooperating with law enforcement entities and protecting users’ privacy, but sometimes there are disagreements to the point where Telegram pulls out from a country altogether.
He claimed that authorities were “confused by where to send requests” to his company.
“But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue,” he said. “We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports. We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.”
He said that the company’s rapid growth has made it harder to keep up with clamping down on criminal activity, but vowed that the company was seeking to do better.
