They will say this is about paedophiles and traffickers. They will say it deliberately, because on that ground no one dares object - and it is precisely there that the most dangerous precedents are set. It is possible to attack freedom without ever using the word “censorship”. In fact, that is the most effective method: leave the right to speak formally intact, and put on trial the person who built the space in which words circulate. That is exactly what happened to Pavel Durov, who was arrested at Le Bourget airport on 24 August 2024 and charged with a long list of offences he did not commit.
The official account is careful not to focus on the decisive point. Durov is not accused of distributing child abuse material, trafficking drugs or laundering money. The charge is “complicity”, a formula as elastic as it is revealing: complicit because he built and ran a space in which others acted. Unable to reach those who actually committed the offences, the State went after the largest and easiest target to identify: the platform.
The channel and those who use it
Any serious legal system should hold firm to a principle which, in this case, is being deliberately blurred: the means and the use made of it belong to different levels. A messaging platform is a channel. Through it pass declarations of love and conspiracies, birth announcements and confessions of guilt, the organisation of a democratic protest and the organisation of an illegal trade. Responsibility for a crime lies with the person who commits it by using the channel. The channel itself does not commit a crime.
Durov gave Ukrainian soldiers the tool with which they defend their territory. He gave those who want to practise free journalism where it is not allowed - in Russia, for example - a way to protect those who communicate. For some people, however, there are acceptable refusals and unacceptable refusals. When Durov says no to Moscow, which demands data in order to hunt down dissidents, the applause is unanimous. When he gives the same no to Paris, the applause falls silent and turns into prosecution.
To demand that the person who builds the channel be held criminally responsible for what passes through it is like dragging into court the company that paved the road used by fleeing robbers. The shortcut serves a precise purpose: to shift the weight of the accusation from those who are difficult to catch to those who are easy to identify. The paedophile remains anonymous, moves around, knows how to disappear. The founder of Telegram has a name, a face, a private jet landing in Paris. He is arrested because he can be reached.
The back door
Some will object that Telegram could have handed over the data, cooperated, opened its archives. This is where the line is drawn between those who defend freedom and those who are prepared to surrender it piece by piece. Encryption does not work like a lock that can be left half-open for the good and firmly closed against the bad: either there is a gap, or there is not. And a gap opened for the French police remains open to anyone who knows how to pass through it, from a compliant intelligence service to a regime hunting dissidents, all the way to the authority that wants to know who has spoken to a journalist.
Those who refuse to open that gap are protecting the very structure of confidential communication, the precondition for every concrete freedom: the journalist protecting a source, the opposition figure organising, the citizen who does not want to be watched because of what he thinks. Weakening encryption in order to find one criminal weakens it for everyone and hands every power, present and future, a tool that is unlikely to stop before those whom that power considers inconvenient.
Child abuse material today, what tomorrow?
Child abuse material is an intolerable crime, and precisely for that reason it deserves tools that truly strike at the target: focused investigations, investigative intelligence, judicial cooperation centred on the perpetrator and on the victim who must be protected. The structural compromising of the infrastructure follows the opposite logic: it affects the entire population of those who communicate and does not even guarantee that a single guilty person will be brought to justice.
Once established, the precedent does not remain confined to the most odious crime. On the contrary, the most odious crime is used precisely to establish it: who would have the courage to oppose a measure presented as a shield for children? Once the principle is accepted that those who administer a channel must be able to open it on request, the application widens by itself: first terrorism, then subversion, then “disinformation”, and finally information unwelcome to those in power.
In Western democracies, the label “disinformation” often becomes a tool for disciplining dissent, a leash for journalists who ask questions that power finds uncomfortable. The Durov case shows the stage immediately before that mechanism is fully in place: the technical construction of the leash.
The real stakes
In short, the accusations against the founder of Telegram are the frame through which power justifies, to itself and to public opinion, an act that redraws the boundaries of what may lawfully be communicated and of who bears responsibility for it.
Behind the frame of child protection, Durov’s arrest tells another story: that of a State which, unable to strike the guilty party, turns on the infrastructure and, in doing so, lays its hands on everyone’s right to communicate freely. An attack on freedom which, in order to remain effective, has every interest in not declaring itself as such.
L.C.
Silere non possum