From Der Spiegel, June 11:
Telegram is one of the world's most popular chat apps – and possibly the
most dangerous. There is little regulation of the platform, which is
popular with criminals and terrorists. Who is the mastermind behind it?
Pavel Durov squats shirtless in the lotus position on a hotel roof,
the skyline of Dubai stretching out in the background. The Instagram
photo, which looks like it could be one of thousands of other selfies
from random influencers, is one of the rare signs of life from one of
the world’s richest and most influential internet entrepreneurs. Some
call the 36-year-old "Russia’s Zuckerberg” because he founded the
Russian Facebook clone VKontakte in 2006. But his latest investment is
much more significant: Telegram, arguably the world’s most dangerous
messenger service.
Little is known about the Russian billionaire, who is considered to
be the richest person in his adopted home of Dubai. And what he does say
in public often sounds puzzling. "The outside world is a reflection of
the inside one,” he wrote as the caption under his Instagram photo.
Durov’s app is a global player, having been installed on 570 million
smartphones. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the app has
been more popular than ever, and the messenger service is considered to
be one of the few communications platforms that can keep pace with
products from Silicon Valley. Millions of users switched this year from
WhatsApp to Telegram, including many in Germany.
But Telegram
isn’t just a WhatsApp with different roots. The service touts itself as a
platform that is beyond the reach of states and authorities, a place
where anyone can write and make whatever claim they want. This attracts
conspiracy theorists, like Germany’s "Querdenker” movement, right-wing
extremists, drug dealers and con artists. It doesn’t take much searching
to find a "hit list” with the names of members of the German parliament
on it. Counterfeiters use the app to peddle fake COVID-19 vaccination
cards, dealers use it to sell all kinds of drugs. Crimes are openly and
visibly planned and committed on Telegram. The app has become the
equivalent of a darknet in your pocket.
Every internet platform is faced with the question of where to draw
the line when it comes to freedom of expression and prohibited content.
Following the last U.S. election, Twitter decided to ban Donald Trump
from the service for the long term, and Facebook stepped up its
crackdown on hate speech. Durov’s Telegram, though, only sporadically
deletes content.
The authorities are powerless, because Durov denies them access to
user data. He has set up an opaque web of companies that is difficult to
penetrate and makes government access even harder. The old and rarely
true saying about the internet being a lawless place really does apply
to Telegram. Durov has registered companies in the Virgin Islands and
Belize. "Me myself, I’m not a big fan of the idea of countries,” he told
the New York Times in 2014.
Other services cooperate with the authorities in response to judicial
requests. For years, though, German prosecutors didn’t even know what
address to use to reach Telegram.
There is now an address in
Dubai, but investigators told DER SPIEGEL that there is no point in
sending inquiries there. They say that they have never received a
response from the company when trying to find out who is behind an
account on which crimes are being committed. And Telegram is proud of
that fact, writing on its website: "To this day, we have disclosed 0
bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.”
From a legal standpoint, Telegram has thus far largely been a blind
spot. Although politicians around the world have been trying to regulate
internet companies for years, the laws barely cover messenger apps.
Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, which requires Facebook, YouTube and
Twitter to delete any illegal or harmful content that is reported to
them, didn’t previously apply to Telegram.
German Authorities Want To Crack Down
But
that is about to change. DER SPIEGEL has learned that the German
Justice Ministry is demanding that Telegram submit to the law. It is
seeking to require the platform to make itself accessible to the
authorities, to delete criminal content promptly and to actively pass on
user data to investigators. The Federal Office of Justice, which is
part of the Justice Ministry, has also opened proceedings to fine
Telegram for failing to designate a contact person for the authorities
and for not offering a criminal complaint procedure for criminal content
as required under German law. The company could face fines as high as
55 million euros. The Federal Office of Justice sent two letters from
Bonn to Dubai ordering hearings on the matter. On May 20, they were
transmitted as what is called a diplomatic note verbale by the German
Embassy to the Foreign Ministry of the emirate.
Still, it is unlikely that will do much to impress Pavel Durov. A
case from December 2011 provides a hint of how he responds to government
inquiries. That year, Russia was experiencing the largest anti-Kremlin
protests since the end of the Soviet Union, and Durov’s hometown of St.
Petersburg also saw 10,000 people taking to the streets against
electoral fraud and Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency.
Durov was still the head of the social network VKontakte, the
Russian-language Facebook clone, which had more than 100 million users
at the time. The Russian government was unhappy with the fact that
opposition groups had organized the protests using the social network.
The Russian domestic intelligence agency FSB demanded that Durov shut
down the groups, but instead of obeying the order, he published the
letter from the intelligence service on Twitter along with a photo
showing a dog in a hoodie sticking its tongue out. Three days later,
armed officers with the special Russian police force OMON showed up at
the door of his luxury apartment. "They seemed to want to break the
door,” Durov later recalled in an interview with the New York Times. He peered at the officers through his intercom monitor but refused to open the door. They left after an hour....
....MUCH MORE
