Podcast: Code Name: Telegram Castle

On 24 August 2024, at around 8 pm, a man and a woman, accompanied by a bodyguard, stepped off their private jet, which had just landed at Paris Le Bourget Airport following a trip to Azerbaijan. The couple found numerous Gendarmerie officers waiting for them; the officers served them with a warrant containing twelve charges and took the man away. The man arrested has been a French citizen for a few years, but was born and brought up in Russia: his name is Pavel Durov, and he is the founder and chief executive of Telegram, the world’s most widely used encrypted messaging service. According to the charges brought by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office, Durov is alleged to be guilty of negligence, and therefore of complicity, in a series of offences committed on the platform. But Telegram, in fact, is not just a messaging service; it is much more than that: it is a geopolitical infrastructure for secrecy, and is therefore at the centre of the interests of every intelligence agency on the planet. Hezbollah militants in Lebanon, as well as in Iraq, communicate via Telegram. The same can be said of Africa Corps, the former Russian Wagner Group, which over the last eight years has quadrupled its presence in what was once known as Francafrique. Russian mercenaries have supported coups and helped to arm military factions both before and after the coups. From Mali to Niger, right through to Burkina Faso. In short, wars are waged on Telegram. It is a complex and multifaceted issue with significant legal, political and social implications. Channels with millions of users that some would probably like to see taken over. Even the Atlantic Council has written about this, with some discussion. Coincidentally, in June 2024, the famous US think tank published a lengthy paper with the direct title: ‘Another battlefield: Telegram as a digital front in Russia’s war against Ukraine’. There’s no need to even translate it. The finger is being pointed at the platform as a battlefield. This is why, following his arrest, Durov has continued to fortify Telegram: Cloud Chats, and the fragmentation of data centres spread across the Netherlands, Singapore, Switzerland and Iceland. This is not merely an engineering quirk. It is a legal defence mechanism. If a French, German or American judge were to order Telegram to hand over a user’s messages, Telegram would technically respond that it does not hold the full encryption key within a single jurisdiction. To reconstruct the content, simultaneous, coordinated warrants would be required in countries with different legal systems, which often do not communicate with one another. This is what experts call a ‘jurisdictional moat’: a legal barrier built on geography. The authors have thus traced Durov’s activities over the last two years, examining the blockchain model designed to further decentralise the corporate structure, and going on to consider how the clash between the libertarian model and the legal battles waged by states – starting with France – will ultimately play out. Guests include Stefano Zanero, a professor at the DEIB (Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering) and an expert in cybersecurity; Dario Sabella, founder of Next G Cloud Technologies; and the French journalist François de Labarre from *Paris Match*.

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