Sending Telegram's CEO to Court

and file sharing app. Pavel and his brother Nikolai founded Telegram partly as a way to allow users to communicate with one another without fear of censorship. But this freedom also means that some people use Telegram to either commit or facilitate illegal activities, and that's what led to Pavel Durov's arrest. Now I should probably put this in right here,

even though it is a spoiler. Dirov has since been released from police custody, but we'll still have to appear in court, which, as I'm recording this has not yet happened. By the time you hear this, maybe it has now. I thought I would give a history of Telegram and some information on the charges that Pavol faces, as well as more information about what Telegram itself does. But to do that, when we first have to talk about a predecessor to Telegram. It is a social media platform called

v Contact. That's Vko n Takte or VK for short, because this launched in Russia. So in two thousand and six, two years after Facebook, or rather the Facebook launched, Pavel Durov created VK with Nikolai So it featured many of the same functions that you would find on platforms like Facebook or MySpace back in the day. Users could create profiles, they could connect with friends, and as I said, Pavel

lived in Russia at the time. He has citizenship in many different countries at this point, including France, and the Russian government has let's say, a little history with wanting to control the flow of information. That's quite hard to do on a platform made up of user generated content. The information isn't coming from some central source. It's not like a media company. It's being generated by the people

who are actually on the platform. One twenty eleven, some Russian citizens were taking to VK to protest recent parliamentary elections. The Russian government didn't want anyone upsetting the borsched cart, so to speak, and so Durav received the polite request that perhaps he censored the posts that were protesting the elections, you know, or else. Durov declined to acquiesce to their request, and so the Russian government decided to pull out all

the stops. Now those stops included using essentially propaganda to heap aspersions upon both VK and Durov himself, but perhaps the more effective tactic was they sent an armed police presence to Durov's house to intimidate him into complying with Russian demands. On top of that, the government allegedly demanded that Durov handover user information linked to accounts identified as

having posted anti government messages. Durov decided that he had had enough of that kind of stuff, so ultimately he

would cash out and sell his interest in VK. This, from what I can tell, happened around twenty fourteen when he officially sold off his interest in the company, but he was already thinking ahead to the next thing and getting out of Dodge or Moscow, as it turns out, much earlier than that, So he and his brother would found telegram back in twenty thirteen, so he still had interests in VK at this point, but would sell them

off the following year. Now, another thing that happened in twenty thirteen that I'm guessing influenced the Brothers was the tale of Edward Snowden. So Snowden was a contractor for the NSA here in America. Now, in the course of Snowden's work, he learned about massive surveillance programs, including ones that involved not just the United States, but it's allies collaborating with one another and sharing surveillance information between them.

And the scope and depth of these surveillance programs really concerned Snowden, so he purposefully leaked information ultimately to the public about them, and that got various governments very upset at Snowden. To put it lightly, Snowden ultimately sought asylum in Russia, where he was granted asylum, and in twenty

twenty two he received citizenship in Russia. While the US government viewed Snowden's actions as a violation of several laws, including the Espionage Act of nineteen seventeen, lots of other people saw what he did as a heroic act of defiance, uncovering questionable and disturbing practices across the world, some of those practices subsequently being found unconstitutional and illegal here in the United States, and he also helped drive home the

concern that your communications with the people in your life might not be as private as you would like to think. One other important change that had happened between the launch of VK and the launch of Telegram was the rise of the smartphone. Back in two thousand and six, consumer smartphones weren't actually a thing yet. The only phonelks who touted smartphones around were like business executives and bleeding edge technology enthusiasts. Everyone else was sporting a cell phone, you know.

Maybe it was a flip phone, maybe it was a candy bar style phone. Maybe you were super cool and you had a sidekick. I really really wanted a sidekick anyway. The point is, accessing the Web in general and social media in particular typically meant you were on a desktop or a laptop computer. But by twenty thirteen we were well into a seed change in which more people were

relying on smartphones in order to access web content. Now, it wouldn't really be until like early twenty fourteen that we started to see web Internet usage on mobile eclipsing desktop usage here in the United States. That is, it

was different for different parts of the world. Here in the US around twenty fourteen, that's when that started to happen, where mobile phones were becoming the primary way that people were interacting with content on the web, which meant web designers were hectically trying to figure out how to optimize pages for users on mobile devices, or to create mobile

specific apps to try and drive traffic to those. I've seen plenty Heck, I recorded ads for how Stuff Works is mobile app way back in the day, because optimizing a page so that it looks good no matter what device you're on was tricky. Like it's easier today because best practices have been created to handle that sort of thing.

But back in like the twenty tens era, that was still a developing discipline, and so there were a lot of outlets out there that created apps hoping that they could drive people to use those apps and manage to monetize that traffic. I never saw download figures on how well the house Stuff Works app did. If I had to suspect what I would guess it was fairly low. I thought it was a decent app, but not not

equivalent to the web page experience. Anyway, the mobile landscape was clearly becoming much more important, and so the Durovs decided they would focus on a mobile centered application for Telegram, at least initially. They set up their headquarters in the United Arab Immirates, specifically in Dubai. So Durov chose this because he said it was quote the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in if we want to make sure we can defend our user's privacy

and freedom of speech end quote. So in other words, Durov was confident that the UAE government wouldn't get so handsy with Telegram as Russia had with VK. The company would launch apps for iOS in August twenty thirteen and Android in October of that same year. That was after Telegram had held a contest for Android developers to essentially port the code over to the Android environnment. Nikolai developed the initial mobile protocol for Telegram that included the encryption protocol.

Now I should add that not all messages are encrypted on Telegram, and that's actually a key component to the issues that Durov currently faces. So in fact, even a one on one conversation inside telegram is not encrypted by default. You actually have to manually turn on encryption if you want your communication to be encrypted. For those one on one conversations, you can have to end encryption that protects

the message from prying eyes. And I've talked about encryption many times before, but basically, from a very high level, here's how it works. You have two users, and they have a means of encrypting and decrypting messages so that the information that's actually sent between the two appears to

be gibberish. An outside party snooping in on the conversation would just see a string of apparently meaningless characters with no real message inside of it, but the individual users would get the decrypted raw text messages or files or whatever it might be into end. Encryption has lots of legitimate, important uses that can help people maintain secure and private methods of communication, and law enforcement agencies often really don't

like it because it makes their jobs harder. I guess it depends on how you look at their jobs, because some people would say, oh, sure, law enforcement's job of surveying all innocent citizens and trying to look for crimes, and others would say, oh, law enforcement's job of being able to detect and then protect people from criminal activity. I guess it really depends on your point of view. But detecting illegal activities is a lot harder if all

the communications between the practitioners are scrambled. And there's been a lot of pressure in different parts of the world on different platforms to open up backdoor access to encrypted communications, essentially to give law enforcement a universal key to decrypt communications so that they can see if there's anything hinky

going on. Now, in many cases this really isn't possible unless you grant access to the end points themselves, like you somehow get access to the actual end devices where the decryption is taking place, because good end to end encryption means that even the platform that's offering it is

unable to break that encryption. Moreover, the design was such that these encrypted chats would only exist on those end devices because Telegram didn't store the encrypted communications in the cloud, So even if someone were to compromise Telegram systems, they wouldn't be able to access the encrypted communications stored there

because there weren't any stored there. Anyway, this protocol that was primarily about encryption, was called mt proto, and Nikolai authored the first version of it, and you can visit the Telegram website to read up on how it works. Although, to be fair, the version that Telegram uses now is MT proto two point zero, and so it's different. Right. It's evolved considerably since the launch in twenty thirteen, and it gets a bit complicated to talk about the details

in a podcast that doesn't have visual aids. Besides that, even if this were a video podcast, I am no expert in encryption, and so chances are I would end up communicating something poorly or just outright incorrectly if I were to really tackle it. The important bit is that mt proto was one of the early building blocks Nickel I made for Telegram, and they also chose to make this an open protocol, meaning the entire community could review

and examine how the protocol worked. This was meant to eliminate trust issues, like the idea is remove trust from being a concern, like there's no reason to trust Telegram. You can look into all of this and make sure that things are run the way the app was claiming it, so users could see exactly how the protocol was handling encryption. And verify that communications were secure, right, like, no copies of that communication would be going to Telegram itself, et cetera.

All right, We've got a lot more to talk about when it comes to Telegram and its features. Before we get to that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors, so we're back. We talked a bit about encryption with Telegram. Another feature that the app would offer early on was a self destruct option for messages. That is, once a message had been received, and then later it was improved so once it had been read, then it

would self delete after a given amount of time. So early on the self destruct was literally like within a certain amount of time since the message was received. Problem is, not everyone reads messages just when they get them, right.

You could be in a situation where you can't. Maybe you're on a flight or something and you haven't had your phone connected to Wi Fi and you're not connected to the internet, so you could receive the message through Telegram, but you haven't had a chance to read it yet, and then meanwhile the timer is ticking down for when it's going to self delete. Later on, they did increase this so that it was after you had opened the

message and then the timer would start. So this was kind of like the original concept behind Snapchat, in which a user could send an image and after a given amount of time, that image would go puff in the receiver's app, except, of course, in the case of Snapchat, copies of those images could still exist on Snapchat's cloud servers.

That was a whole thing Telegram was saying, Okay, well, that's not going to be the case with us, Like, the messages are only going to exist on the end devices, not in the cloud, So once they delete, that's it. We don't have a copy of it, so they're gone. Also, originally, the self delete feature only worked for the receiver's side, so the person who sent the message would still be able to see the message after it had been deleted

off the second party's device. Eventually, Telegram would change that as well, where the message would get deleted off all the devices, both of the devices, because this only works on end to end or user to use their communications, so one on one situations. But yeah, originally it was just the person who received it. Their message would get deleted. Clearly, if you want to send let's say, a really sensitive message and you don't want other people to snoop in

and see this. Having it self delete not just on the person who received the message, but also your device would be really important. I mean, what if someone got hold of your and then thumb through to try and

see what kind of messaging you'd been up to. If you are in a country that has a really authoritarian government that is just looking for a reason to throw you in the whoscal Yeah, you want to have a messaging app that's going to clear your history so that you don't have to worry about getting hauled away for violating some authoritarian rule. Now telegram would allow for more than just one on one communications, though these other methods would not enjoy the benefit of end to end encryption,

which again becomes part of the problem for dear off. Now, so you could have a session in which one user was posting to many other users. This would be kind of a broadcast approach, one person broadcasting to many I like to think of this kind of similar to ways that Twitter now x works, or threads or something like that, where you can post a general message and it goes out to anyone who can follow you, or or sometimes

if you're posting to the public, anybody at all. You could have a session in which you know, you have a group chat, potentially a really massive group chat. Telegram is said to be able to accommodate up to two hundred thousand users in a single chat session. I have no idea how you would be able to parse such a thing or even just keep up with chat now.

I've been in YouTube chat rooms where there were you know, around one thousand people watching something, and obviously only a slice of that population is even bothering chatting while they're watching, and even in that case, keeping up with what's going on is really challenging to do, so I don't know how you do it in a Telegram chat room. To be fair, I've also never used Telegram personally, so I don't have any real experience with this app on a

user level. Telegram also allows for file transfers between users, which, along with the encryption and messages that self delete after a given amount of time, make up a large part of the reasons that authorities have been concerned about this app, because anytime you have ways for people to share information, there's a concern that people are going to do that

in order to further nefarious goals. By December twenty thirteen, the Telegram community had plugged one quote unquote significant vulnerability in mt proto as part of the first Telegram crypto contest. That's according to Telegram's own timeline of how things evolved

in the app. The person who discovered the vulnerability received a one hundred thousand dollars bug bounty for doing so, so there was an incentive to help improve the protocols and to look for things like vulnerabilities, and overall this would benefit the entire community, So it was an effective way to improve the product. You may your own community QA testers in a way. The following month, Telegram offered the feature of file transfers, with an initial file size

limit of one and a half gigabytes. That's a fairly hefty file sized and Telegram did not restrict the types of documents that could be transferred across its service, so whether it was a JPEG or a doc file or a PDF or whatever it might be, you could send it as long as it was as it wasn't larger than one and a half gigabytes. Around that same time, developers created a client for PCs, so this expanded Telegram beyond the smartphone environment. This would eventually evolve into the

Telegram desktop app. In February twenty fourteen, developers created a web based app for the service, and others made a version of the app for Windows Phone. Do you remember Windows Phone? I mean that was still a thing back in twenty fourteen. In fact, it would remain a thing for five more years. Microsoft officially in support for Windows Phone in twenty nineteen. Telegram was evolving rapidly, so the next feature added to the app in March twenty fourteen

was support for voice messages. So now you've got file transfers, you've got one on one communication, you have one to many in the broadcast channels, you've got chat, you've got voice messaging. At this point, also the app changed how it handled secret messages. This is when we got to

the change for self destruct. So again, earlier self destruct only affected the receiving device, but now, starting in March twenty fourteen, the messages would disappear from both the sender's device and the receiver's devices, so you no longer had a trail of these messages. To list all the feature upgrades month by month would become really tedious, And as I said, if you go to Telegram's timeline of the evolution of the app. You can actually read all about this. Weirdly,

it's it's listed in reverse chronological order. I guess that makes sense if you just want to know what the most recent additions are to the app, But if you're looking at it from a historical perspective, it's very weird to start from the most recent and work your way backward, because it just means that as you go on, the app gets fewer features over time because you're going back in time. I actually read it in reverse order anyway, There's no reason to go through all of them. It

would just get very tedious. You did see a lot more features get added over time. The app just would get more and more robust every year, gain support for everything from multiple file uploads where you could do several files at a time, particularly photos like you could you could choose multiple photos as opposed to doing them one at a time, to playing animated gifts, you know, like you know, the standard stuff that you encounter in various

social platforms today. Later updates incorporated the ability to play media files directly within the Telegram app. You know, previously you would have to download the file and then play it in some other media player app. Now that capability was built directly into Telegram itself, it also opened up

support for bots. These could be incorporated into chat rooms to enhance the experience in various ways, though frequently not really for moderation, which is again like content moderation, I mean, and that is another issue that we'll talk about in this episode. So the list of features has grown now to a point where it would take an entire episode

to cover all the things that Telegram facilitates today. It encompasses everything from allowing payments through the app for physical and digital goods, to an in app currency called Stars that users can use to reward other accounts for stuff. It's kind of like the bits you would find on Twitch, that kind of stuff. Okay, So that's all fine. Telegram has evolved since it first hit the scene in mid

twenty thirteen. You would expect that, right, as many of the same features that you find in other platforms, while also being largely free from traditional advertising and, according to the dourovs from data mining. Right Like, if you're on WhatsApp, which is owned by Meta, you know that Meta is scraping a lot of data from you. Because that's what

they do with all their platforms. That's their bread and butter, right like whether it's on Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp, that ends up being really valuable information when Facebook is looking for ways to sell targeted advertising with you in mind. So the original concept behind Telegram was that it wouldn't be profit oriented at all. It was not organized as a not for profit organization, however, that's important to remember, but the concept was that profit would not be a

driving consideration for the service. That the Dourovs were determined to create a useful communications platform free from external interference, which included not just governments, but things like corporations. But Telegram does earn revenue primarily. It does this through in app purchases, so rather than settle for the bog standard experience, a user can shell out money to access premium features

like customization tools and such. This can include stuff like stickers that can be used in chat rooms or themes for chat spaces, that kind of thing. Users can even design their own stickers and offer them up for sale in a digital marketplace, with Telegram getting a cut of the action, so they take a little percentage of each sale done through that method. Telegram also does work with businesses in ways that allow for other revenue generation methods.

I did say also is largely free of advertising, but not totally free of advertising. There are ads on Telegram, however, they are limited to appearing within broadcast channels that have at least one thousand subscribers ONTs more, these ads can own only appear as text messages, and they have a hard limit of one hundred and sixty characters. On top of that, businesses can establish their own channels and their own groups within Telegram, and that in turn is another

revenue stream for Telegram itself. But now let's talk about the dark side of this application. So one consequence of creating a platform that aims to be free from censorship and government involvement is that people who wish to engage in illegal activities will make use of those services in order to further their own goals. Complicating matters is that you're talking about an app that is available around the world, and what is legal in one nation may not be

legal in another. Plus, Deurov himself has citizenship in multiple countries, including France. Further, Telegram's general policy in response to governments demanding data is to tell those governments to pound sand it. Really, it doesn't matter what the situation is, Telegram will say it's not our policy to share that user information with you,

and we're not going to do it. Durov has said that Telegram's commitment to privacy is more important than things like our fear of how bad people could use Telegram. He says privacy is more important than what someone might use Telegram to do. So, when US lawmakers ask Telegram to hand over information connected to people who were involved or suspected as being involved in the insurrection on January sixth, twenty twenty one, Telegram denied that request. They said, no,

that's against our policy. Now there are concerns that, you know, things like terrorist cells are making use of Telegram in order to communicate with each other. There are also cases in which people are using Telegram to distribute everything from

pirated content to really serious issues like child pornography. And that encryption, as I said earlier, really only works for one on one communication, So for the case of things like chat rooms or broadcast channels, as well as just the default settings for user to user communications, there is no encryption, which means any illegal activity that's happening across

those channels is potentially viewable. In fact, the only type of communication that actually uses encryption and only if it's manually switched on, means that Telegram isn't really an encrypted communication tool. It's just a communication app that happens to have one end to end encryption feature that's only on if you turn it on, and only for certain use cases. That ends up becoming a massive problem for Deroff, or potentially a massive problem. I mean, it could turn out

that no charges are filed and nothing happens. But the reason why he was detained by police in the first place, you could argue, is because cause Telegram does not encrypt everything. I'll explain more, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, So the reason that it's important that Telegram does not offer encryption across all methods of communication on the app is that it means Telegram potentially could view the stuff that happens on its own network.

It could be aware of the things that are transpiring on Telegram, and lots of countries have rules in place that state a platform is obligated to moderate the content that happens on the platform itself. It's not responsible for generating that content necessarily, but it is responsible for moderating it. Here in the United States, we have rules that protect platforms from being held accountable for the stuff that users post to them. The infamous section two thirty is about this.

So the thought behind all of this is that you can't really blame a platform for something that someone a user does on the platform itself. The responsible party is the person who did the illegal activity, not the platform where that illegal activity happened. However, this protection only extends so far. If a platform is unwilling or unable to moderate content, to remove illegal content, to act when needed to curtail illegal activity on the platform itself, then it

can see that protection get stripped away. So your protection only lasts as long as you are accountable. So, as an example, if someone were to upload a movie to YouTube and they don't have the right to do this right like they've taken a pirated copy of a film.

Let's say it's Big Trouble in Little China, arguably the best movie ever made, and they've put Big Trouble in Little China up on YouTube and they don't own the rights to Big trouble in Little China, and YouTube is made aware of this, They're alerted, Hey, someone has uploaded copyrighted material and they don't have the right to do it. Then YouTube is obligated to take that video down or whatever action the copyright holder deems appropriate, or else YouTube

risks losing that protection we talked about. YouTube itself would not be held responsible for the initial upload as long as it did act accordingly once alerted to the infraction. Now, Telegram largely doesn't police content on its platform. However, there are exceptions. One big one is in matters that deal with child abuse. The company relies on users to report

instances of content relating to child abuse and then takes action. So, according to an article by Jordan Pearson of the Verb which Telegram claims to do this around one thousand times per day, yikes, it is horrifying to think that child abuse material is that rampant to begin with, And of course that just marks the instances where someone actually reported it,

so that's pretty horrifying. Complicating matters is that Telegram has been accused of only putting up a show when it comes to content moderation that, rather than outright removing offending channels and material. Telegram simply just makes them hidden, so they're not removed, they're just hidden from average users, which means people who know where to go could still go there and still engage in this activity, and that seems

to be a pretty big problem. It's kind of the look the other way approach, which is you can easily argue that is essentially facilitating and being complicit in illegal activity that's happening on those channels, and these policies are what put durav on thin ice with authorities in France. Telegram could technically take a much firmer stance with content moderation.

There's nothing stopping the company from doing so. The communications are not encrypted in things like chat channels and broadcast channels and most to end user communications unless they've manually turned that setting on. So the fact that Telegram doesn't appear to take this kind of action opens the possibility for authorities to charge Durov and the company overall with facilitating illegal activity. The act of not acting becomes the issue.

The French authorities have argued that Durov is complicit in crimes that range from money laundering to the distribution of abusive materials and everything in between. This is what Dirov is going to have to face when brought before a judge, where he might possibly be indicted. By the time you hear this episode, that decision may already have been made, but as I record this, it is yet to happen.

Though he again was released from police custody. Now that's not necessarily an indication of where things are going to go, because the authorities had until today, which is Wednesday, August twenty eighth, twenty twenty four, when I'm recording this, to officially charge du Off or to let him go. They couldn't hold him longer, not legally anyway. So if he gets charged, that's up to the judge. But yeah, the

case is a really complicated one. So on the one hand, I do believe there is a real need for systems that allow for secure and private communication. There are people all around the world whose lives could be in danger if they do not have access to those kinds of tools, and there are plenty of examples, including here in the United States, where if your communications were open to surveillance, then you could really suffer as a result of that,

even if you were not guilty of any crimes. I mean, there were cases in the nssay of people who were allegedly spy paying on communications that had no illegal activity connected to them, but happened to belong to say an X right, like an NSA contractor or agent was using the tools of the agency to spy on people they knew personally, or to look at things like let's say someone is sending a nude photo of themselves to their loved one or whatever. Being able to intercept that and

look at it. I mean, that happened a lot. And you know, again that's not connected with illegal activity necessarily, so there's no justification for intercepting that information and then you know, saving it or looking at or whatever it may be. So there is a real need for ways to communicate securely and privately. However, we're not really talking

about the secure component of telegram in this case. We're talking about a platform in which Durroff could conceivably be made aware of illegal activity going on across his platform that obligates him to take action. Failure to do so indicates an element of complicity in those crimes. Now, if everything were encrypted, then Durov would really be free and clear, because true encryption would mean he would have no way

of knowing what is actually transpiring across the platform. The people might make use of the platform to conduct illegal activities, but that's beside the point, because people commit crimes all the time on things like the road. Right, you don't shut the road down. It's not the road's fault that anyone did that, that's just where it happened. So if everything were encrypted and there was no way to know what anyone was doing on the platform, Durov would probably

have a really strong defense. But the fact that there are all these methods that are not encrypted. In fact, only one method is encrypted, that's what really gives him potentially a huge problem, because you can make the argument, hey, there's nothing stopping you from being aware of this illegal activity, and the fact that you're not doing enough to curtail that means you are complicit in that, and we're going to hold you accountable. So that's kind of where he

finds himself today. The ferocity of authorities in this matter also raise concerns about security and privacy. Some experts that Pearson in his article on The Verge quotes, they say that really the matter is more about how much did Derov know about the illegal activity, not so much about the private, secure communication aspect of Telegram. But still, we

do live in a post NSA prism world. We live in a world where we are aware of the various attempts to monitor communications, whether those communications are criminal or otherwise, and we know that people have exploited those programs to various degrees to the harm of innocent citizens. So seeing authorities go after the CEO of a company that provides that kind of communication, even though that's just one small

part of what telegram does, it does raise concerns. It makes you worry about surveillance states and this almost pathological need to have access to all information just in the case that something in that giant mass of data represents illegal activity. It's kind of the concern about being presumed guilty until proven innocent. That's kind of the opposite of, at least how we like to think the American system goes. Once in a while, it actually is true that people

are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That's nice when that happens, but yeah, something like this, it gives the lie to that right. The implication is that you're presumed to have been guilty of something. It's just that something may not yet be discoverable. Pretty dark stuff. But yeah, my personal opinion does doesn't really matter in this case. I'm curious what other people's opinions are. But I feel I have

a complex reaction to this. I don't like the concept of a platform allowing illegal content, particularly illegal content that disproportionately hurts children, to continue to be able to do that without repercussions. I find that to be really disturbing. I appreciate the need for a place where free speech can freely happen, but even free speech, at least here in the United States, has its limitations. Free speech is

not meant to be absolutely free of consequence. Just means the government can't dictate what you can and cannot say, but there can be consequences to what you do say. It's a fine line and it's complicated anyway. I hope that you learned something in this episode, that you learn more about what telegram is, where it came from some

of you out there maybe a telegram users. I know that a lot of folks who use telegram are in other countries, in places like Iran and India, and these are places where governments can be quite authoritarian in their desire to control the flow of information. Also, I do find it somewhat ironic that when it was announced that Durov was arrested in France, some countries, notably Russia, expressed condemnation for that, saying this is a strike against free speech,

which is rich coming from Russia. I mean, that's the same country that Durov fled from after Russian authorities essentially tried to seize control of VK and Duv left Russia to found Telegram in the UAE largely because of that. And here you have Russia saying shame on you Frans for arresting this guy who's a Russian citizen as well, he still maintains Russian citizenship. And meanwhile, it's the same country that caused Durov to flee in the first place.

So yeah, everything's politics. I guess that's what that boils down to. That's a cheerful thought, you know what. I'm just gonna leave that there, and I'm gonna go off and I'm gonna have a snack, maybe I think a cupcake. Gonna have a little cupcake to kind of soothe my feelings on this matter. I hope all of you out there are doing well, and I'll talk to you again

really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.