Last month, Pavel Durov’s arrest at Le Bourget airport in Paris ignited a flurry of speculation about the judicial and political dynamics underlying the apprehension. Was the American national security apparatus reigning in a wayward asset? Was Macron serving up a cold dish of revenge for Telegram’s role in torpedoing recent French elections? Were the Russians involved? And did the UAE freeze a billion-dollar deal to buy French fighter jets to pressure France to release him?

Most of these questions seem fancifully tinged with the kind of sensational claims designed to generate likes on X. But putting aside the arrest itself, there are a slew of other unanswered questions about Telegram — which, well on track to join the billion-user club, has 950 million users — including the nature of its security and encryption, the app’s freedom-fighting origin story, the company’s relationship with the Russian government, and, of course, the nature of the charges against Durov. These layers of context themselves tell a story about Telegram, its rocketing rise as a global platform, and the legal perdition Durov faces.

On Saturday, August 24, around 8pm local time, Durov was arrested at Paris-Le Bourget, a general and business aviation airport. Twenty minutes before landing, at 7:10 local time, Durov’s Embraer Legacy 600 veered off course, turning sharply south before returning to its previous southwest course five minutes later. The temporary reroute led to speculation that Durov was tipped off about the impending arrest and ordered his pilot to exit French airspace, but, the theory goes, the plane didn’t have sufficient fuel.

Around two hours after the plane landed, French news outlet TF1-LCI broke news of Durov’s arrest. Contrary to later reports that Durov was arrested on the tarmac, TF1-LCI reported that when Durov disembarked, “nothing [looked] out of the ordinary for a billionaire.” With an assistant and a bodyguard, he proceeded to the VIP lounge where they waited while identity checks were done. French border guards then “invited” Durov upstairs where he was placed under arrest.

According to TF1-LCI, the Telegram CEO’s first move was to request that authorities notify Xavier Niel, a French billionaire who is supposedly close to Macron and who was appointed to the board of TikTok owner ByteDance a little more than a week after Durov’s arrest. Niel’s appointment to the board of ByteDance comes amid a significant widening of economic relations with China’s government, which also has a seat on ByteDance’s board. Durov reportedly told authorities he had come to France to meet Macron, something Macron’s office denied — “[t]he president was absolutely not aware of Pavel Durov’s visit to Paris,” the Élysée Palace told a French news outlet. “It has in fact come back to us that [Durov] claimed to have had an imaginary meeting with the head of state, and that he also boasted of having ‘numerous high-ranking acquaintances.’” An investigation into Durov, carried out by France’s Center for Combating Digital Crime and the National Anti-Fraud Office (ONAF), had been under way for months. Investigators were surprised that Durov had decided to come to France, where he would be vulnerable to arrest. A separate ONAF investigation related to allegations that Durov committed “serious violence” against one of his children was also ongoing. Durov, whose fortune is an estimated $15.5 billion, is a citizen of Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates and the island-nation St. Kitts and Nevis.

Last Friday, Durov broke his silence with a message on his own Telegram channel and on X thanking supporters. Durov noted that Telegram has an “official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests,” and that the French government had many ways of getting in touch with him and the company, including a hotline to Telegram “to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.” Durov — who spoke of Telegram’s “growing pains” as it hit new user milestones — also noted that, “[i]f a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself.”

The charges against Durov, who has since been released on a $5.6 million bail, were announced in a press release put out by Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau. The charge sheet detailed six charges of “Complicity,” including web-mastering a platform that: facilitated illegal activity by an organized group; possessed pornographic images of minors; enabled selling or transporting narcotics; and facilitated fraud. There is also an ambiguous charge of complicity related to developing tools “designed for or adapted to get access to and to damage the operation of an automated data processing system.” Finally, there are charges related to money laundering, illegal use of cryptographic technology, and “criminal association with a view to committing a crime or punishable offense.”

The complicity charges have received perhaps the most attention online, with one spoof post on X announcing France had arrested the (fake) CEO of Bic pen company for allowing criminals to write things down. However, complicity is supported by legal precedent in France. In January, the French High Court allowed a case to proceed against French concrete maker Lafarge for crimes against humanity related to one of its Syrian subsidiaries, which had wired around $6 million to ISIS and jihadist group al-Nusra Front between 2013 and 2014.

Despite this, there’s been a lot of discussion about free speech and whether Pavel’s arrest is a legitimate legal action or a political crackdown. Macron himself previously came under fire when he personally granted Durov French citizenship in 2021, despite allegations that there was not a strong legal basis for him doing so. One commentator, Franco-Spanish human rights lawyer Juan Branco, tied the decision to Macron’s personal enthusiasm for Telegram and contrasted it to the arrest. “We have an executive power that, in 2021, considered that what Pavel Durov was doing with Telegram was rendering services to the nation in such a way that it justified granting him nationality as an exception,” Branco wrote in an oped. Despite this, Macron’s “prosecutor’s office, tasked with executing its criminal policy, decides in 2024 that these same actions are now liable to result in 20 years in prison.”

Macron has strongly denied any political motive in the arrest. But his longstanding personal involvement with Telegram as his app of choice is well documented. The French president’s use of Telegram extends back to 2015, when Macron served as Minister of Economics, Industry and Digital Affairs under President François Hollande. According to a 2018 report in French news outlet Le Journal du Dimanche (LeJDD), an aide turned Macron onto Telegram and, from that moment, it was adopted by “all of Macron’s inner circle” — particularly in Macron’s secretive, and ultimately successful, campaign to remove his boss, Hollande, from office. LeJDD reported at the time that in Macron’s circle, “everything” ran through the app — a practice that continued once he assumed the presidency in 2017. But it wasn’t just Macron. “At the Élysée [presidential palace], Matignon [prime minister’s residence], in the ministries, or in the National Assembly, emails or SMS are rare, and many political decisions are discussed and finalized via Telegram,” LeJDD reported. Gérald Darmanin, then Minister of Public Action and Accounts under Macron, responsible for the state’s finances and tax system, was reportedly “addicted” to the app and ran a group discussion on it for his deputies and other aides to discuss official state business.

Already in 2017, there was pushback against French top government officials’ widespread use of Telegram. National Assembly member Jean-Michel Fauvergue, who had formerly led the elite French police special force unit RAID, opposed the use of the app, saying, “I fought the jihadists, and they too used Telegram.” This was substantiated by a 2016 MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) study that found that ISIS and Al-Qaeda had shifted the bulk of their propaganda and communications to Telegram. The app’s Channels features, which allows one-to-many communications, made it appealing to groups like these. “[C]ontent shared on Telegram channels goes beyond the mere reposting of jihadi groups’ propaganda, and includes tutorials on manufacturing weapons and launching cyberattacks, calls for targeted killing and lone-wolf attacks, and more,” the report stated.

Another French politician raised a separate concern at the time. “You can be sure that one day, the content of our groups will end up in the media,” National Assembly member Richard Ferrand warned ominously. Ferrand was more over the target than he might have realized. Only a small portion of Telegram, its Secret Chats for one-on-one chats, facilitates end-to-end encryption. The rest of the app is built on a cloud-based system whose security is provided by a bespoke protocol called MTProto developed by Pavel Durov’s brother, Nikolai. To guard against government intrusion, Telegram distributes its servers across five national jurisdictions, making it harder for any single government to compel it to release information. As a result, Telegram’s FAQ says, “several court orders from different jurisdictions are required to force us to give up any data.”

Despite its distributed infrastructure, French officials had good reason to worry. A big part of what fueled Telegram’s rocketship growth was its openness. As a cloud-based service, Telegram lets users sign into their account from any device, much like you do on Facebook or X. In many ways Telegram more closely resembles a social media platform than a messaging app. Its thousands of Channels allow users to broadcast to groups of people around a topic or interest, with tens or hundreds of thousands — sometimes even millions of people — joining around an idea, activity or ideology. Its Supergroups allow for groups (where all members can interact) of up to 200,000 members. The platform is far more dynamic than any other messaging platform, supporting not only massively popular games but its own blockchain, The Open Platform (TON); a decentralized auction platform, Fragment; and the capacity for developers to build mini-apps, web applications that run inside of Telegram. Last year Telegram forged a partnership with Tencent Cloud to provide computing for its mini-apps.

“Telegram is a cloud-based service where messages are relayed from your device to the company’s cloud and then from their cloud to wherever recipients of the message are logged in,” Marcel Gerardino, cybersecurity and blockchain director at FINLABS, told me over a video interview. “They have control of the encryption keys and of the messages you send and receive.” When I asked why Telegram chose this route, Gerardino explained, “Telegram favors shiny or convenient features over security. It’s very open. By default, you share everything, even your phone number. You have to adjust the privacy settings, [otherwise] they make it so everyone can find you, which makes it a prime platform for scammers.”

A full accounting of the app’s security has proved challenging, since the tech is closed-source. But a number of vulnerabilities were identified in its MTProto, including a 2017 zero-day vulnerability, a 2019 vulnerability involving Telegram stickers, and vulnerabilities identified in 2022 — when the app reached 700 million users — that included a vulnerability to a man-in-the-middle attack, when an attacker intercepts and potentially alters communication between two parties. The vulnerabilities were patched but — per Gerardino — this was “a huge red flag.” By contrast, he said, Signal, which is end-to-end encrypted across the platform, is based on a well-tested peer-reviewed protocol, TLS (transport layer security) developed by the US government. Signal’s own protocol has been integrated into apps and tools owned by Meta (including WhatsApp), Google and Microsoft.

It was Telegram’s ease of joining and signing in — without having to daisy-chain devices with QR codes, as you do on end-to-end encrypted apps — that fueled its wild growth. And its massive Channels, which are un-encrypted, turbocharged its virality. But powering the growth was its core differentiator from other platforms and messaging apps: a brand rooted in independence and security — a story that Durov masterfully told since the app’s very inception.

It’s possible, though speculative, that Macron or members of his government had realized some of their most sensitive communication was at risk. But one clear-cut fact in the case raises a manifestly more political issue. In June and July, France held legislative elections whose outcome was nothing short of a disaster for Macron. Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally party shocked the French establishment in the first-round of voting, taking 33% of the vote. In an act of political desperation, a coalition of misaligned leftwing and hard-left parties was formed to outflank Le Pen in the second round of voting. This left Macron not only squeezed between the margins of the right and left — that is, forced to partner with the extreme left in order to block the far-right from being voted into power — but, until recently, without a functioning government. With Macron’s centrist block holding 160 seats, the leftist bloc holding 180 and the right-wing party RN with 140, there was no clear majority in the National Assembly, leaving Macron unable to pass legislation.

The investigation into Durov was opened on July 8 — just one day after the ground-shaking elections. (The following day, July 9, the government opened an investigation into Marine LePen for alleged campaign finance offenses.) With these investigations, a former diplomat who requested their name not be used told me he believes Macron was acting in response to deep anxiety about France’s political stability that many in France attribute to the destabilizing effects of social media. In this view, Macron saw rising political and social instability fomented by social media land on his own doorstep. With no functioning government and in a politically precarious state, Macron was left without good options. One thing he could do is send a strong message.

“What we’re seeing is frustrated action by Macron where an opportunity arose, rather than structured action between countries and agencies,” the former diplomat said. “France has no functioning government right now. Macron cannot pass laws so he took action. He attributes the problem to social media.”

In this view, Durov was not only the right-sized target — arresting Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would clearly be beyond the pale of what’s possible politically, legally and logistically, while Durov doesn’t enjoy the kind of institutional and political alliances Musk and Zuckerberg have built over decades — but also had a history of refusing to play ball with French, and other, governments, causing ire among agencies tasked with confronting crime online. A week before the French elections, which coincided with EU elections, the prime minister of Estonia told Bloomberg News, “Disinformation is spreading openly and completely unchecked on Telegram.” Her chief complaint — and, she said, that of “other [EU] member states” — was not that disinformation exists on the platform, but that Telegram refused to police it.

Europe is not the only geopolitical body involved. Putin commented that the French prosecution has a “selective character.” The sight of the Russian government rallying behind Durov carried a certain amount of irony, considering the company’s origin story began with the Durov brothers’ Russian social network VKontakte coming under increasing pressure from the Kremlin, which motivated them to create Telegram as a way to escape Russian censorship and control. “The No. 1 reason for me to support and help launch Telegram was to build a means of communication that can’t be accessed by the Russian security agencies,” Durov told TechCrunch in 2014, a year after the company was founded.

At the core of Telegram’s founding myth was a story of internet altruism fighting the forces of oppression with an end-to-end encrypted messaging app whose code would be open for all to see and which would make the company resistant to censorship. “[W]e will be able to invite everyone to review the messaging algorithm that we use on Telegram and inspect the source code of the app. We can earn trust from them, that end-to-end encryption is something that can be done on the client side.” Telegram also told its user base that it would never seek revenue and, if needed, would run on funding from the Durovs. Pavel went so far as to claim Telegram was actually a non-profit. “I hope Telegram will be able to rely on the community even more than [VKontakte] since it’s a non-profit project,” Durov said in 2013. Very little of this turned out to be true. As we’ve seen, most of Telegram was never end-to-end encrypted. Far from the pledge to never seek advertising, it now runs a number of ad programs. And, according to Anton Rosenberg, an early member of the VKontakte team who later sued the company for wrongful termination, the company was first registered in August 2012 as a Russian LLC and – a few months after Durov claimed it was a non-profit — as a UK limited liability partnership.

After a Russian conglomerate acquired a controlling interest in Vkontakte, Durov was eventually fired from the company in 2014, which is when, according to Rosenberg, he began focusing fully on Telegram. It was that year, in mid-February, when Telegram started gaining traction. The app caught a major break when Whatsapp went down for 4 hours, and Telegram instantly became the top app in 46 countries. In the US, it ranked #1 in the social media category, ahead of Facebook and Whatsapp.

In December 2014, Durov told the New York Times about a Russian government crackdown that culminated in a standoff at Pavel’s St. Petersburg home with a Russian SWAT team. “They had guns and they looked very serious,” he said. Despite this, Durov has apparently not stayed away from Russia. Kremlingram — which describes itself as an “investigative group studying Telegram’s security and its potential ties to the Kremlin” — says it was leaked a document showing Durov traveled to Russia at least 60 times between 2015 and 2021. This contradicts Durov’s own statements — “I’m out of Russia and have no plans to go back,” he told TechCrunch in 2014. “Unfortunately, the country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment.”

But long before men with guns showed up at his door, Durov seems to have had quite a different relationship with the Russian government while he was building VKontakte. According to a report by independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Durov wrote in 2011 to a political apparatchik about his cooperation with the government: “As you know, we have been cooperating with the FSB and the K Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for several years now, promptly providing information about thousands of users of our network in the form of IP addresses, mobile phone numbers and other information necessary for their identification.”

In 2018, Russia banned Telegram until 2020, when an official Russian communications body said it was lifting the ban, in part because Telegram had agreed to cooperate in monitoring “extremist” content. The two-year ban, however, did little to hamper Telegram’s growth in Russia. Today, it surpasses Whatsapp in terms of traffic volume (measured by the amount of data flowing through the app) and is by far the most popular social app for young Russians. According to Kremlingram, the app has become the primary communications tool for the Russian military, which may be one reason that the Kremlin, which formerly had an antagonistic relationship with the app, has come out in support of Durov.

While Durov’s arrest seemed to ignite a slurry of questions about the app, the reality is that those questions — or the ambiguity, obfuscation and complexity that precipitated them — were always there. The arrest only threw a match into the powder. In a way, Telegram is as much caught up in these events as it is a cause of them. Durov’s arrest embodies the boiling issues of security, censorship, government interference, geopolitics and the manic competition for all-important eyeballs that is the Internet today, which is less and less an index run on a protocol and increasingly an infinitely complex quasi-organism that (as if by intention) grows more opaque the harder we try to understand it. What was the cause of Durov’s arrest? It might be one of the factors above, but more likely it’s all of them. What matters more is that it’s a first — a precedent — which signals that it likely won’t be the last.

Telegram isn’t going anywhere — at least not anywhere but up. And even with Durov prohibited from leaving France, it’s hard to see how this latest incident doesn’t, somehow, go away. But at very least, this is a shot across the bow, directed at Telegram. The question is who will fire next — and how big the round will be.

— Ashley Rindsberg