Who is behind the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov
Pavel Durov has caused trouble with his refusal to open up Telegram to the secret services, as Mark Zuckerberg does with his various products. The order for Durov’s arrest is therefore likely to have come from Washington. However, it is not unlikely that Israel is also or even mainly behind it.
Source: Dr Peter F. Mayer, TKP.at, 27 Aug 2024
Mike Benz, a former State Department official, is accusing the US State Department of being complicit in the arrest of Telegram founder Durov in France; he is calling on the US House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee to subpoena all correspondence between the US embassy in Paris and prosecutors and government officials prior to the arrest. This was reported by the Telegram channel JFK TV.
Connections to Israel
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz establishes a link to Israel. It concerns large amounts of data that were extracted from a computer connected to the Israeli Ministry of Justice.
“Links were published on Telegram that made it possible for anyone to download the manipulated files. However, they soon disappeared again. One by one, the hacker’s Telegram channels were shut down, their users deleted and the posts containing the download links deleted.
Since 7 October, Israel has also been facing an unprecedented onslaught of cyber attacks , according to Haaretz: Accounts of officials and key figures in Israel’s security apparatus, servers of private companies, military and defence companies, municipalities, hospitals and even government ministries and key institutions they work with have been targeted, if not successfully hacked, in a seemingly endless series of attacks, the full extent of which has yet to be disclosed..
Telegram has proven to be a major challenge for Israel since the war began. While many tech companies have optimised mechanisms for states to reach them, Telegram is considered the least cooperative of them all.
What’s more, while many social media platforms have invested heavily in moderation, allowing people and organisations to help monitor content – for example, removing anti-Semitic content or posts inciting terrorism, or even removing videos of the 7 October massacre – Telegram has not. Both states and users have a single email address to which they can send their complaints.
Telegram proved to be a key platform for Hamas’ information warfare against Israel at the beginning of the war, which Israel was unable to properly counter because it lacked both monitoring capabilities and knowledge of the platform.
Alarmed by the wave of pro-Hamas content, which included videos of the actual attack as well as a constant stream of propaganda material, Israeli high-tech experts attempted to reach out to Telegram’s founder, Pavel Durov, in late 2023.
Although they successfully contacted Durov, who lives in the United Arab Emirates, he did not respond to private requests to improve moderation on the platform. Although some pages directly linked to Hamas’ military wing were later blocked locally, the private initiative failed to make any real impact on the app’s founder.
Sources explain that Google or Meta will block a site if it is found to be directly linked to Hamas, and Amazon will remove a site if it contains terrorist material. With Telegram, content cannot be removed using such arguments. Only clearly stolen goods are removed, so claiming content is the only effective way for Israel’s judicial authorities.”
LifeSite News has recently published interesting analyses in connection with Israel. Since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, both of whom had a critical relationship with Zionist leaders, no US president has dared to criticise Israel’s military adventures or withdraw his support. The Kennedys had tried to impose controls at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons centre to prevent the building of nuclear bombs.
Now the article considers it certain that the world is facing a potential nuclear conflict in the Middle East because Israel is urging the US to join it in attacking Iran. This comes at a time when Iran poses no threat to the United States and nuclear powers Russia and China are actively supporting and supplying Iran with sophisticated weapons.
The article in LifeSite News gives an excellent background to the events currently unfolding in West Asia, but is only marginally related to Durov.
The future of Telegram
The Telegram channel InfoDefense writes about the impact of Durov’s arrest on the future of the messaging service:
“Telegram has over 950 million monthly active users, a significant number, albeit only a third of Facebook’s user base. This suggests that over 2 billion people who were previously unaware of Telegram now know about it following Durov’s arrest. They have the opportunity to switch from a platform criticised for its collaboration with the CIA to a platform run by a man who, following his arrest by the neoliberals, is rightly seen as a defender of freedom of expression and privacy.
It is worth remembering that Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky at one point appointed Jacob Rothschild as his “confidant”, which gives Rothschild the right to take over all of Khodorkovsky’s voting rights if he ever suspects that Khodorkovsky is acting under pressure. Durov is certainly aware of this legal manoeuvre.
Keep in mind that Durov never renounced his Russian citizenship.
Note that Durov was in Azerbaijan at the same time as Putin and his trusted advisors.
Assume that Durov was born a genius by providence, which means that his actions and behaviour are often incomprehensible to ordinary people and sometimes even seem strange or supernatural.
Remember that Durov has repeatedly expressed his commitment to protecting Telegram by emphasising its role in promoting freedom of expression and privacy. He probably sees his creation as a child for which he would sacrifice a lot – even his own freedom.”
The EU takes a rather relaxed view of Telegram
As the EU Disinfo Lab states:
“Overall, at EU level, the only policy on disinformation that is enforceable for Telegram consists of the general DSA obligations that apply to all online platforms. It is therefore up to Telegram alone to decide whether and how it wants to tackle the challenge of disinformation.”
While the media throws around terms like ‘terrorism’, ‘crime’ and ‘money laundering’, the likely offence here is that Telegram refuses to play along with the disinformation. There is no doubt that the press will continue to make the matter a crime issue. And that’s nominally true – if you consider the refusal to control (false/dis/mal) information a crime. In reality, what we are witnessing here is the criminalisation of what someone else defines as disinformation.
On the role of the EU and Western “democracy”, AfD MEP Christine Anderson:
