It is expected soon a decision by French magistrates on the case of Pavel Durovdetained, according to French media, at the ‘Office national anti-fraud’ in Ivry-sur-Seine, south of Paris, following his arrest on Saturday, as part of a criminal case against him last July 8 following a preliminary investigation by the Juridiction nationale de la lutte contre la crimine organisée (Junalco) of the Paris prosecutor’s office, a section created only in 2020.
The precautionary measure lasts up to 96 hours, then what happens?
Durov’s pretrial detention was extended on Sunday evening by one of the prosecutors assigned to the case. The precautionary measure can last up to 96 hours from the moment of arrest.in the name of the provisions established for organized crime offences. Once the terms have expired, the judge can decide to release him or to formalize charges directed against him and further extend the custody. The magistrates following the case are relying on the investigators of the Center for the Fight against Digital Crime (C3N) and the National Anti-Fraud Office (Onaf).
Is Durov the ultimate target of the investigation?
According to French media, the tycoon’s bodyguard and assistant, usually always at his side, were questioned by investigators before being released. Junalco’s cybercrime section has formalized the charge against “an unidentified person” – a formula that, the Washington Post also points out, could open the way to the possibility that Durov is not the final target of the investigation – 12 charges, including complicity in crimes and organized crimes on the platform (such as drug trafficking, sharing child pornography, money laundering) and refusal to provide information necessary for authorized wiretapping. The founder of VKontakte and then Telegram was arrested as part of this same investigation opened in early July.
Durov, almost 40 years old, originally from St. Petersburg (moved to Italy at the age of 4, after the collapse of the USSR, as he himself said in an interview) was stopped after his arrival on Saturday from Baku at Le Bourget airport, north of Paris, aboard his private plane, using his documents as a French citizen (he had obtained nationality in August 2021). Durov had planned to spend at least Saturday evening in Paris, where he was supposed to have dinner that evening.
The legal case raises doubts but above all a heated debate. The contents on Telegram, as well as those on Whatsapp, are moderated in a very limited way, in the name of a, perhaps presumed, protection of freedom of expression and confidentiality with users. Telegram claims lack of content control is forced by technological issues and therefore that it makes no sense to attribute responsibility for the abuses committed to the company’s top management. “It is absurd to say that a platform and its owner are held responsible for the abuses,” the company commented on Sunday, ensuring that the platform complies with European standards.
“There must be something else. Perhaps the French authorities have evidence of an event that the operators could have prevented? Perhaps they could have removed child pornography, or something else, and they didn’t do so?” he asks. Tim Weningera researcher at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the American University of Notre Dame and an expert in disinformation in an interview with a French newspaper dedicated to the tycoon who left Russia in 2014 to move to Dubai and who also has citizenship of the United Arab Emirates (which, like Russia, have asked the French authorities to activate consular protection services to protect Durov) and Saint Kitts and Nevis. “If Durov could be arrested, I don’t see why Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg can’t be arrested. or someone else, due to the dangerous content present on the platforms”. Although, some point out, platforms like Facebook and X collaborate much more with the authorities and for this reason Telegram is more in the crosshairs than the other giants.
Telegram: Lack of Moderation and Collaboration
American law, like French law, does not protect platforms from legal cases focused on the conscious authorization of the transmission of materials related to sexual abuse or terrorism, Daphne Keller of the Stanford University Cyber Policy Center, quoted by the Washington Post, said. The issue, for the former anti-terrorism director of Facebook, Brian Fishmanis not a lack of moderation, a criticism leveled at numerous platforms. Telegram, he added, “has been a critical hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates (child abuse material, ed.). It has ignored reasonable cooperation with law enforcement for years. This is not ‘soft content moderation’; this is an entirely different approach.” This position is shared by Alex Stamos, former director of the Internet Observatory at Stanford University. His team, he reported, found that “Telegram is a critical component of the ecosystem of individuals who trade and sell child abuse material and is the only major platform to implicitly allow the exchange of what is known in the jargon as CSAM (child sexual abuse material), much of which is protected by end-to-end encryption,” explained the current chief information security officer at a cybersecurity firm.
Jean-Michel Bernigaud, secretary general of Ofmin, a French police agency specializing in the prevention of violence against minors, wrote this in a post: Durov’s arrest is related to the app’s inability to address content offensive to minors. “At the heart of the case is the lack of moderation and cooperation on the part of the platform,” particularly “in combating sexual crimes against minors.”
Following the entry into force of the Digital Services Regulation (DSA) in Europe, service providers, including platforms, are required to offer their users a tool that allows them to easily report illegal content. The notified content can be deleted or blocked by the platform in question. However, platforms do not have a general duty of surveillance and it is always up to the users of the service to notify content that they consider illegal. But as the Commission clarified yesterday, it is not for a violation of the DSA that Durov was arrested.
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