Analysis of the Telegram case and the arrest of Pavel Durov.

It was once said that wars were won more by blacksmiths and farriers than by soldiers, because the war’s success depended largely on the forging of weapons and the shoeing of horses. The most recent battle victories depended largely on mechanical engineers and mathematicians, the former for building tanks, ships, warplanes and the latter for deciphering the enemy’s coded messages. In modern wars, mechanical engineers have been joined by electronic engineers and mathematicians have been largely replaced by computer engineers.

Considering the current scenario between the Atlantic Pact and Russia, someone could think that the arrest of Pavel Durov, captured at Le Bourget airport in Paris last Saturday 24 August, is an international counter-espionage operation and not what it appears to be, that is to say, the arrest of a criminal colluding with other criminals.

Pavel Durov was arrested because of Art. 323-3-2 of the French Criminal Code, which, in very simple words, targets online platform providers who knowingly facilitate criminal activity and refuse to cooperate with the Authorities to eradicate them.

After his arrest, Pavel Durov was released on bail, a ludicrous bail for the defendant with a fortune of more than $15 billion and was subject only to a mild bi-weekly obligation to sign and prohibition to leave French borders.

These measures are not convincing. It sounds to me like when it happens that the undercover private detectives of my Octopus detective agency, in agreement with the Police, are arrested along with their suspects, so that they don’t let them know they have been screwed by our infiltration activity, but then the private detectives are not properly handcuffed, because the policeman on duty, knowing who they are, has too many qualms about treating them as criminals.

Many years ago, a Client approached my detective agency in Treviglio because he suspected that his wife was trying to recruit a killer to kill him. His suspicions were well-founded. One of my private investigators and I managed to propose ourselves to the woman as hitmen, videotaping the meetings. Then we alerted the Police, who intervened upon delivery of the advance sum required by us to commit the crime. I know, it was a no existent crime because we were not real hitmen, but I was anxious to abruptly interrupt the woman’s search for the killer (before she found a real one) and hoped that the affair would affect child custody, as fortunately it did.

Well, when there was the fake arrest in flagrante delicto, I had to whisper to the young policeman pretending to search me to do it a little rougher, otherwise my client’s wife would not believe it.

Now the transalpine judiciary will have to prove Pavel Durov’s actual criminal intentions, which is quite a complex matter considering that it is all at stake in the IT field, in which Pavel and his collaborators are evidently above average.

The second thing that is suspicious is the abundance of indictments, suggesting the famous and bad judicial technique (well known in Italy) of shotting off large and numerous charges, in the hope that some charges will stick. For French magistrates Pavel Durov allegedly committed 12 crimes:

  • He allegedly already planned Telegram with the intent of facilitating illegal transactions on behalf of an unspecified or as yet undisclosed criminal or illegal organization.
  • He allegedly refused to cooperate with French authorities to enable them to prosecute crimes committed thanks to and with the help of Telegram.

As a consequence of these first two offenses Pavel Durov was charged with:

  • Complicity in the possession of child pornographic images.
  • Complicity in the distribution of child pornographic images within an organized criminal group.
  • Complicity in the trafficking and distribution of narcotics.
  • Complicity in offer and transfer of equipment, tools, programs and data aimed at hacking and damaging computer systems.
  • Complicity in organized fraud.

Based on the last five charges, it is obvious that Durov was charged with two other related crimes:

  • Conspiracy, since the prosecution’s case sees him as conniving with criminals exploiting Telegram for their benefit.
  • Money laundering, since all the above criminal activities have the ultimate goal of illicit gains.

Finally, to close, there are the charges closely related to the management of Telegram. These are “bureaucratic crimes,” but no less serious:

  • Lack of appropriate certified statement for the provision of cryptographic services.
  • Provision of non-compliant cryptographic tools without the necessary legal requirements.
  • Use in France, therefore importation into the transalpine country, of cryptographic services and tools.

To these 12 charges it appears that others of domestic violence and violence against a minor child are being added, but it is unknown whether these are journalistic fantasies based on false accusations by Durov’s ex-wife following their separation.

The severity of the charges against Pavel Durov in France is jarringthe ridiculous measures regarding bail and obligation to sign.

The severity of the charges against Pavel Durov in France is jarring the ridiculous            measures regarding bail and obligation to sign.

The possible conspiracy on Pavel Durov’s arrest.

          Leaving aside the usual conspiracists who cry gag against freedom of expression and liberticidal Europe, there are two unproven but more plausible scenarios.

The first concerns a possible international counterintelligence action. Before Telegram, Pavel Durov in 2006 founded VKontakte, the Russian Facebook, of which he was finally expropriated in 2014 by the Kremlin, that is, by Vladimir Putin interested in keeping under control his ridiculous “democracy”.

Following this sad affair of Soviet bullying, Pavel Durov had to repair abroad, where, together with his brother Nikolai (who is the IT genius of the two), he had founded Telegram in Dubai in 2013.

Telegram has also caught fire in Russia, so much that a second Soviet-style expropriation was expected, so it is not entirely excluded that Durov’s arrest is part of an operation to help him, by taking away from Putin information about the war in Ukraine or Russian dissidents.

A second plausible hypothesis is that Pavel Durov is not at all complicit in the crimes committed via Telegram, but he had been undergoing them for some time without being able to stop them. And it would have been unwise of him to get help from his Soviet compatriots, in view of the rampant corruption and Russian state-mafia entanglements. Indeed, it is well known that most of the big international online scams, cyber-attacks, major illegal transactions, and the most abject trafficking find their impunity in Eastern Europe and Russia.

My Milan-based Octopus detective agency has dealt in the past with investigations of stolen goods in Italy, fenced in Ukraine and ended up in the hands of Russian mafia end buyers.

 

The confidentiality of communications and the strange turnout

on Telegram since Pavel Durov’s arrest.

          Those who have Telegram, like me and all the private investigators who collaborate with my Octopus detective agency in Cassano d’Adda, know that if one of their contacts downloads the app, they get an alert that they are on Telegram. Immediately after Pavel Durov’s arrest, it seems that all my contacts are registering on Telegram, even those who had proved unable to do so when I asked them for confidentiality reasons.

Until now, I use Telegram, Threema or Signal; when my detective agency Octopus is dealing with particularly sensitive cases or when, as a private detective licensed in defensive criminal investigations, I work for Clients subjected to particularly aggressive judicial persecution by prosecutors.

My choice on these three messaging services instead of WhatsApp does not have particularly elaborate technological motivations. Simply when I meet with friends from the Judicial Police I listen to them, and I decide accordingly. In the last period everyone was cursing Telegram, because no prosecutor’s office technician could intercept it. Even worse were the curses about Signal and Threema.

Before Telegram, Signal and Threema, when I had opened my second detective agency Octopus in Milan, WhatsApp was enough. But by now this messaging service is wiretapable, although a bit expensive for District Attorney’s Office.

Before that, when I had founded my first Octopus detective agency in Treviglio in the province of Bergamo, the evolution of mobile telephony with the Symbian operating system had, for a time, made Nokia devices particularly vulnerable even from unauthorized spies. Whereas with the appearance of the first smartphones, so easily reprogrammable, a good old Nokia with basic functionality suddenly became secure.

At that same time there was the habit of Skype phone calls, with my friends in the Judiciary cursing modern technology used for criminal purposes; nowadays Skype is eavesdropping.

Basically, in communications espionage and counter-espionage there is only one certainty, and that is that there is no certainty with the obligation of always having to keep up to date, because there is a constant battle going on between those who protect communications and those who look for ways to neutralize the protections.

Over the years my Octopus Investigations agency has had to adaptwith always new technologies to protect its customers from spies.

Over the years my Octopus Investigations agency has had to adaptwith always new technologies to protect its customers from spies.

Over the years my Octopus Investigations agency has had to adapt with always new technologies to protect its customers from spies.