Pavel Durov criticizes outdated laws after arrest for criminal activity on Telegram

September 06, 2024Ravie LakshmananPrivacy / Data Security

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has broken his silence nearly two weeks after his arrest in France, saying the accusations were false.

“If a country is not satisfied with an internet service, the established practice is to take legal action against the service itself,” Durov said in a 600-word statement on his Telegram account.

“Using pre-smartphone laws to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is the wrong approach.”

Durov was indicted late last month on charges of enabling various forms of criminal activity on Telegram, including drug trafficking and money laundering, following an investigation into the distribution of child sexual abuse material by an unnamed individual.

He also highlighted the difficulties of balancing privacy and security, noting that Telegram is willing to exit markets that are not compatible with its mission to “protect our users in authoritarian regimes.”

Durov also blamed “growing pains that have made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform.” The popular messaging app recently passed the milestone of 950 million monthly active users.

“That’s why I’ve made it my personal goal to make sure we make significant improvements in this regard,” he said. “We’ve already started that process internally and I’ll be reporting back to you on our progress very soon.”

The company has since updated its FAQ to allow users to report illegal content in private and group chats by flagging it for review using a dedicated “Report” button, a major policy change and a feature that was previously banned.

Durov’s statement, however, does not address the lack of default end-to-end encryption (E2EE) protections, which users must explicitly enable in one-on-one chats.

“It’s also a ‘cloud messenger,’ meaning all messages reside on Telegram’s servers rather than on the user’s device,” noted Moxie Marlinspike, creator of the E2EE messaging app Signal.

“With a single request, the Russian Telegram team can obtain all the messages that the French president sent or received to his contacts, all the messages that these contacts sent or received to their contacts, all the messages that the contacts of these contacts sent or received, etc.”

Matthew Green, a security researcher and associate professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University, also criticized the platform for making the process tedious, requiring at least four clicks on Telegram’s iOS app.

“The feature is explicitly not enabled for the vast majority of conversations, and is only available for one-on-one conversations, and never for group chats with more than two people,” Green said.

“As a weird bonus, enabling end-to-end encryption in Telegram is oddly difficult for non-expert users to do. Secret chats only work if the other person is online at the time you do this.”