Pavel Durov
Photo: REUTERS.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov has broken his silence two weeks after his arrest at Paris’ Le Bourget airport by publishing a post on his channel. If you read between the lines, you can conclude: Durov is ready to cooperate with the French authorities and is not at all willing to go to prison for the sake of the principles of the “free Internet.”
Decorating the message with a heart and thanking the audience for their support, love and memes, Pavel called “astonishing” the prosecutors’ claim that French security forces received no responses from the messenger’s administration to requests about the data of suspected users. After all, Telegram has a representative in the European Union who can be easily contacted.
In addition, the French contacted Pavel through their consulate in Dubai and Durov, at his request, opened a “hotline” to help France fight terrorism.
After complaining that if people are dissatisfied with an Internet service, they should sue the company that owns the service, not its CEO, the billionaire laid out a formidable thesis. Innovators will not make progress if they know that if they make mistakes, they will be liable to third parties who use their technology.
“We have always been open to dialogue,” Durov said. But citing examples from Russia and Iran, he recalled that when he could not agree with the authorities on the balance between user privacy and security, he was ready to ban Telegram.
Well, then Pavel repented. He admitted: the mechanism for receiving requests from law enforcement agencies is imperfect and Telegram is growing at a dizzying pace, so not all criminals can be caught. Durov promised to improve and “achieve significant improvement.”
The businessman is now free. He is walking around Paris with his girlfriend Yulia, smiling at the camera. He is looking after his own apartment or house. I have already checked in at the police station a couple of times and left him safe and sound. He transferred the first million euros as collateral (five in total are needed, the rest in instalments) – a trifle, a tiny fraction in the context of a fortune of 15.5 billion.
But France is not Russia, where Durov has always left without hindrance. According to Paris Match, Pavel’s ban on leaving the Republic will last for six months. The founder of Telegram faces six heavy charges. In addition, a lawsuit from the mother of his three children, Irina Bolgar, has been added: Durov allegedly beat her youngest son in Paris until he suffered a concussion.
The billionaire hopes that if he is a “good boy,” he will be forgiven.
Unfortunately, logic does not always work with Emmanuel Macron. He even brought the winners of the elections in his own country to their knees. So the option is not entirely ruled out: borrowing the Telegram “keys” from Durov and imprisoning him.
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