WSJ: Telegram founder Durov’s phone hacked by French secret services in 2017

5 comments

1. > French President Emmanuel Macron had suggested Durov move Telegram’s headquarters to Paris in 2018 and offered him French citizenship that same year. Durov declined the first offer, but took up the second, eventually becoming a French citizen in 2021.

   muhahahaha – that’s some 4D thinking by the French right there

2. There is a more important paragraph where a source close to Durov says that the Russian ignored court rulings on email for several years. He handed over user data to India, for example, but did not cooperate in catching terrorists in France https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/29/telegram-shares-data-of-users-accused-of-copyright-violation-following-court-order/

   All companies comply with court decisions and create transparent pages on their websites about this. Examples

   * https://signal.org/bigbrother/
   * https://tuta.com/blog/transparency-report

   But usually people implement E2E encryption, which makes it physically impossible to get private messages, and Telegram does not have such protection

3. they were inspired by the series “le bureau des légendes”

4. Why do these tech guys get involved in volatile governments and underworld? They aren’t built for this line of work

5. Durov [tweet](https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk/status/1828712036890525810) in 2012 that he received military training in the field of propaganda in St. Petersburg :)))