DailyPost 2899
TELEGRAM – ENCRYPTED FOR GOOD?
The arrest of the Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has brought into centerstage burning issue emanating out of the present social media revolution raging across the globe. Governments and technology barely gel well from a governance point of view, making technology compliant a difficult and complex task. They are forced into policy creation and effective enforcement of tech enterprises. When it comes to social media, it becomes worse. At the personal level we have seen its addictive nature in life and also in the movie named Social Dilemma. The political parties, leaders and governments have played fire with it and got away with it. But no more.
Brexit and US presidential elections 2016 are very well known cases in point, there would be innumerable others for sure, which have not made it to the worldwide attention radar. That social media is practically unregulated is to state the obvious. Social media giants have redefined the power of governments, law & order, investigation, and in the same breath demonstrated how audacious they can be in challenging issues related to human life and the inherent legal powers of any nation state. Today no one knows as to what happened to the investigation into the Facebook – Cambridge Analytica sordid saga. Telegram, having started in 2013 had its first brush with similar issues in 2016, ironically in France itself.
The 2016 Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray church attack was carried out by two 19-year-olds Adel Kermiche and Abdel Malik Petitjean. They used Telegram to send encrypted audio messages to his contacts detailing his plans for the attack days before it happened. The use of Telegram’s encryption made it difficult for the authorities to intercept and prevent that attack. This is where it all started, the dire need to have scrutiny over encrypted apps like Telegram. The wheel has taken a full circle and now in 2024, its CEO is arrested by French authorities on charges of Telegram being used for illicit activities, including drug trafficking and distribution child sexual abuse material. This might just turn out to be the watershed moment in the history of social media.
The arrest of Durov demonstrates how some global authorities may seek to deal with tech chiefs reluctant to police illegal content on their platforms. A small cyber-crime unit within the Paris prosecutor’s office has fired the first global cyber salvo. He was released on a bail of 5 million euros and must report to the police station twice a week. ‘Secret Chats’ are certainly a bone of contention. End to end encryption has its own nuances, which enforcement of the law of land cannot digest. Given its encryption-based tech stance the legal investigations reach a dead end. Leave France aside, no nation state cannot tolerate this state of affairs. If a sovereign country cannot intercept communication against itself, it can better be termed a banana state. Telegram claims that it cannot selectively provide decryption keys for specific users without compromising the privacy of all users.
PRIVACY AND ITS PERMISSIBLE EXTENT IS A STATE FUNCTION AND CANNOT BE RUN ROUGHSHOD BY PRIVATE ENTERPRISE FOR CRASH COMMERCIAL REASONS.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.