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Founder and CEO of Telegram messaging service arrested in France
(www.tf1info.fr)
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this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
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Yes, but... I mean, it is being used for all of that.
It doesn't matter in the slightest.
Making a tool that provides a private communication service literally everyone should have unrestricted access to does not make you an accomplice to anything.
So is the Internet, better go arrest my ISP.
The ISP will absolutely cooperate with law enforcement though, unlike telegram. That seems the nature of the issue in that there is a lack of moderation and oversight, which anonymity is not mutually-exclusive from flagging nefarious activities, ideally. I REALLY am not too keen on giving safe harbor to the likes of pedos and traffickers and what have you.
Secure communication between individuals is a fundamental right. That nefarious activities can be conducted over secure channels can never be justification for suspending that right.
I'm not sure I yet agree with that. People can have secure communications; that's called meeting in person and in a private room. That line gets blurred with intercontinental mass-communication that ultimately is beyond the use of the average citizen and is more frequently utilized to nefarious ends. If the damage outweighs the benefits to society, then clearly a rational limit perhaps should be considered.
Ultimately, what matters is respecting the house rules; and if the house rules of France were broken, why in the world would he travel there?
I reject the premise of your argument: secure communication is not more frequently used for nefarious purposes than non-nefarious purposes.
But even if I accepted that premise, I would still reject your argument. The underlying principle of your argument is misanthropy: humans are inherently evil. They will always choose evil, and therefore, they must never have an ability to effectively dissent from totalitarian control.
The dangers posed just by the French government greatly exceed the dangers posed by every single person who ever has or ever will "nefariously communicate" over every communications platform that has ever been or ever will be invented.
Yeah I haven't committed to one side or the other yet. For me it's less about misanthropy and more about transparency and accountability. The nature of the French democratic government means it is by extension held accountable to some albeit imperfect extent by the people. After all, the laws are by Transitive Property an extension of the people. But who holds accountable the sex trafficker that cannot be tracked? Conversely we can always say, "if you're doing nothing wrong, then why do you need to hide it?" An age-old dilemma. There probably should be a reasonable middle-ground between privacy and accountability.
The sex trafficker can absolutely be tracked by doing old-fashioned police work: you spend time, money and energy to infiltrate the network, gain their trust and eventually take them down. But this requires police funding and training.
It's not a dilemma, the answer has been given multiple times: under the rule of law, law enforcement has to prove (or at least demonstrate a strong suspiscion) that you're involved in illegal activities before they can intrude in your privacy.
But with the advent of mass data gathering and the exemple given by the NSA, all law enforcement agencies dream to change this paradigm.
That "old-fashioned police work" IS very often communications monitoring. I have no problem with you saying a search warrant should be necessary, after all. Focus on the breaches of trust by the government institution for which you have some level of oversight, as opposed to providing a safe harbor for all nefarious communication in blanket form. It is thus not unreasonable to have Telegram provide some semblance of moderation and oversight to filter out obviously-nefarious, illegal activities while permitting the rest to pass-through uninterrupted. Communication isn't wrong; demonstrably criminal communications, such as child sex trafficking communications, are. To think how many murders and sex-trafficking incidents were caught by the monitoring of communications following a warrant.
Let's instead focus on the transparent institutions moderating what is illegal to curb government overreach as opposed to providing a blanket safe-haven for mold to propagate. This is basically the Silk Road all over again, and for good reason that too was shut down.
Accountability is something a government owes to the people. It is not something the individual owes to the government or the public. It is not and should not be easy for the government to invade individual privacy.
What "accountability" do you owe when I falsely declare you to be a kiddy diddler? What "accountability" do you owe when the government is the one making the false accusation against you? I ask, and I answer: you owe nothing at all.
The government, when Democratic anyway, is a reflection of the people. Quite literally the etymological root of the word. We are fortunate to live in a time where when such a western democratic government does something wrong — particularly in France — the people can demand change by way of riot or vote. By extension, such laws were drafted in representation if not direct referendum by the people. In other words, the extension of this CEO getting arrested on France soil IS the will of the people. And if the will of the people demands a degree of security and resources to inhibit crime, then so be it.
I wonder to what extent encrypted communications permitted (or would've exacerbated) the likes of the Charlie Hebdo attack in France. I'm pretty sure 99.99999% of all communications the average citizen does not need to be secured beyond the capacity of a search warrant to reveal.
You're right, it should not be easy; but it should also not be impossible when necessary.
You're locking up a member of "we the people" not because he actually committed any offense against the people, but because he provided an essential service to the people, and you don't like how some entirely hypothetical person may or may not have used that service.
You are stripping a person of their political power and authority, on the basis that a larger group of people agree with your position. That is not democracy. That is "populism". It disgusts me that so many fail to understand the difference.
Populism is two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. Democracy is every measure taken to keep the sheep from appearing on that ballot.
No I am not locking up anybody.
A foreign national landed on the property of France, and is thus subject their laws forged in the blood of Democracy — and if you're going to enter the house of someone else, you better abide by their rules, yes? He was then arrested — not locked up in prison — in lieu of a legal warrant.
If you don't like the house rules, then don't go to France. Pretty simple.
Telegram seems to be failing in its duty to properly moderate communications on their platform that involve deeply fucked up shit, which you don't seem to care all that much about, curiously.
Telegram has no such duty.
Oh, I'm sorry. I don't want to give you the wrong impression. I do care. I care very much. I don't want to give you the impression that I "don't seem to care", because I absolutely do: I care very deeply about ensuring everyone has the ability to freely discuss all the "deeply fucked up shit" they want to. The more "fucked up" you think that shit is, the more the individuals discussing it should be protected from you.
Your accusatory use of the word "curiously" is exactly why I care so much. Go shove your vaguely menacing commentary up your piss hole.
That's for French courts to decide, not you or me. Their house; their rules.
From pedophilia to sex-trafficking, you care very deeply about protecting their rights to discuss and coordinate these things without oversight or traceability...?
... Alrighty then.
So yeah, okay, buddy — I venture a guess that you know, consciously or subconsciously, that your arguments are quickly crumbling by the accelerated rate of substituting substance with insults & deflections. Truly, a classical dead giveaway of rhetorical checkmate.
Yes. You're clearly not a student of Thomas Paine:
I'll note that your response is not a rebuttal. Secure communication is a fundamental right, regardless of what France thinks about it.
Remind me when Thomas Paine elects the leaders and writes the laws of France.
Yeah yeah yeah... And I'll even help by giving you another to add to your notebook:
- Benjamin Franklin
And yet, when the liberties of one are at the detriment of another's, therein lies when Government intervenes — no different than a parent settling a dispute between two children. As I said, private communication can exist: it's called speaking to an individual in a private room. The difference is that there are moments when warrants warrant an intervention or moderation thereof. So to say again, an intrusion on private conversation should not be easy, but it shouldn't be impossible when necessary either. Many Democratic nations seem to come to the same conclusion.
After all, "Secure communication is a fundamental right" isn't a fact; it is your opinion that has yet to be established, and is thus subjective if not arbitrary in scope and domain. Let's not put the cart before the horse and present a circular-reasoning fallacy whereby the premise itself has yet to be established.
Why? They happily hand all your data over to whoever asks and so does everyone else that’s why they can single them out because you’re already bought and paid for.
It is but so are phones and computers in general. Same with cars, many crimes require transportation.
As always, there's a lot of nuance which is lost on Lemmy users.
It's a question of exactly what telegram is being used for, what telegram the company can reasonably be aware of, what they've been asked to do, and what they've done.