Was the Arrest of Telegram's CEO Inevitable?

Casey Newton, former senior editor at the Verge, weighs in on Platformer about the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

'Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly. Telegram never even pretended to.'

Officially, Telegram's terms of service prohibit users from posting illegal pornographic content or promotions of violence on public channels. But as the Stanford Internet Observatory noted last year in an analysis of how CSAM spreads online, these terms implicitly permit users who share CSAM in private channels as much as they want to. 'There's illegal content on Telegram. How do I take it down?' asks a question on Telegram's FAQ page. The company declares that it will not intervene in any circumstances: 'All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants,' it states. 'We do not process any requests related to them....'

Telegram can look at the contents of private messages, making it vulnerable to law enforcement requests for that data. Anticipating these requests, Telegram created a kind of jurisdictional obstacle course for law enforcement that (it says) none of them have successfully navigated so far. From the FAQ again:

To protect the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption, Telegram uses a distributed infrastructure. Cloud chat data is stored in multiple data centers around the globe that are controlled by different legal entities spread across different jurisdictions. The relevant decryption keys are split into parts and are never kept in the same place as the data they protect. As a result, several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data. To this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user data to third parties, including governments.

As a result, investigation after investigation finds that Telegram is a significant vector for the spread of CSAM.... The company's refusal to answer almost any law enforcement request, no matter how dire, has enabled some truly vile behavior. 'Telegram is another level,' Brian Fishman, Meta's former anti-terrorism chief, wrote in a post on Threads. 'It has been the key hub for ISIS for a decade. It tolerates CSAM. Its ignored reasonable [law enforcement] engagement for YEARS. It's not 'light' content moderation; it's a different approach entirely.

The article asks whether France's action 'will embolden countries around the world to prosecute platform CEOs criminally for failing to turn over user data.'
On the other hand, Telegram really does seem to be actively enabling a staggering amount of abuse. And while it's disturbing to see state power used indiscriminately to snoop on private conversations, it's equally disturbing to see a private company declare itself to be above the law.
Given its behavior, a legal intervention into Telegram's business practices was inevitable. But the end of private conversation, and end-to-end encryption, need not be.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.