You Telegram, or Durov of our brother

How to find a legal and fair balance for the state, citizens and business? No way

Ten days, the “many children” Pavel Durov, only once flickered in the night gate of the Parisian court, when, hiding in the womb of the minibus, he went into darkness after the payment of the pledge, continues to be the hero of the imaginary first lanes - and certainly the telegram he had created.

As usual in such cases, the hero became a mirror for many other characters and a reflection of fermentation in minds and turbulence in processes.

It is important for me as a user that telegram works as it works, with about the same set of functions and the conditional reliability that it is now. In vain, I, in the end, in the end, for six years in TG two channels at once!

At the same time, I have no illusions regarding the safety and confidentiality of telegram. Practice has shown that any device can be hacked. Any messenger can be opened. Remote correspondence - restores, secret chats - are declassified. This is only a matter of time and effort. Somewhere they need less, somewhere more, somewhere you have to tinker even for a long time. But there are no unnecessary castles.

There can also be no illusions, regarding Durov’s robingudism, his unbending, fundamentalness in refusing to cooperate with special services.

If you sincerely believed in this, this is an exclusively problem of your naivety and pinkness of your glasses, but you really are not a Durov problem. On the same days, Tsuckerberg himself innocently said that yes, his company had to literally filter the information related to Covid during the pandemic. But worse - also sift what they wrote about Biden and the adventures of his family. And this is Zuckerberg! In free America with public control, independence of the media and real justice.

Of course, Durov and his team could not avoid attention and special services and state bodies - and not avoid compromises. This can be sad for our ideas about the ideal digital hero, but compromises are an inevitable fee for the opportunity to conduct a business in which hundreds of millions of people participate in communication, the exchange of information and opinions. Moreover, with all the achievements of telegram, it remains a niche network, having greater popularity in the space of the former union, in the third world countries and in territories where the advantages of freedom, democracy and law are not yet obvious to society or the authorities.

And it so happened that in the States or Europe, Telegram became a convenient platform not for fighters for law and freedom, but for merchants with bad substances and distributors of dubious ideas. As I understand it, hence Durov’s problems are at least those that are officially formulated by French justice.

We have completely different problems. Russian propaganda (and spokeswoman for the president himself) at once stood up to defend Paul and his brainchild. What is especially funny against the background of the fact that only this year the telegram had at least 17 serious failures in Russia, which are very similar to attempts to “practice cats” and still cut down the messenger, doing what they could not do back in 2018, when telegrams officially (and unsuccessfully) tried to block.

But "if Yevtushenko is against collective farms, then I am for." We cannot support the French. All that they do, being a deeply unfriendly country, is automatically bad. And everyone they haunt automatically become positive heroes. Therefore, now we are all amicably defending both Durov and his project. Which does not guarantee at all that over time both Durov is cursed and telegrams are blocked. But so far the position is like that.

The opposition and political emigration (not all, of course!) Is guided by a similar principle: if the propaganda “for collective farms”, then we automatically against it. You can’t sing in unison with Peskov.

And over these days, the close study of P. Durov’s moral appearance in the microscope revealed numerous spots on this sun. And he blocked the opposition channels with the bots (as if it were now clear), and the drugs, it turns out, are looking for TG in one click (and what didn’t care about you before?), And he flew to Russia repeatedly, although he said otherwise. Well, then I lied. So he flew. Although in the fact of arrivals and departures from my own country, I don’t see anything nightmare. And if he met people during these visits that are not very sympathetic to us, this is still not a crime.

Of course, they did not forget about this spectacular lady who, with Durov, seems to have three common children whom he had left, and children have to even fly instead of personal jets on ordinary aircraft (the phrase of the week, of course, is a quote from Durov’s children: “Where are the other people come from?”). Yes, a lot of things surfaced, characterizing Pavel Durov as an imperfect person and citizen. But the Christmas trees, why did you forget how, while still the owner of VKontakte, Durov scattered from the Zinger mansion into the Nevsky bill and mocked people who crawl, feverishly collecting money flying from the sky? This performance, in my opinion, was voluminous and unequivocally described by Durov himself and his attitude to people and the world around him.

But "we love him not only for it." Drawing an ugly image of an unworthy subject, we justify for ourselves the need to plant him in a casemate. However, he is accused not of poor behavior, random life and inattention to children, but in completely other things.

And this situation poses completely different questions. How to find a reasonable balance, legal and fair for three sides at once?

The state, which is by its nature interested in control and has a desire to climb into someone else's life.

Citizens who are interested in the freedom of obtaining information, the freedom of expression of their thoughts and guarantees of their security and immunity.

And business, which is the same telegram.

It would be nice to have universal rules. In which, for example, cases of special services have the right to violate the secret of correspondence and exchange of information and a messenger or social network are obliged to promote this in this. And it seems to be even clear what is about. Nobody wants terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers and distributors of pornography to leave the answer. But the problem is that

If in a free society there are at least some ways to maintain power structures from abuse, then in the non-free countries there are no these retrains.

Unfortunately, we know who we include in the lists of terrorists and extremists. And we see how real terrorists capture hostages in the isolator and there are no stripes on their prisoners that they are prone to violence and should be in special control. We understand that in the same Iran the court will easily agree on any actions in order to gain access to private correspondence. But formally, it will look the same as the consent of the French court to give good to disclose the correspondence of a bandit.

We understand that universal rules to develop right now it will not work. And at the same time we see that Durov was delayed and accused not at all the “strangler of freedom” Putin, but the dearest uncle, Liberal Macron. And this brings confusion to our templates and turns stereotypes on its side.

Therefore, we reinforce our thoughts with formulas like the one that cannot be judged by the director of the brick factory for the fact that someone was killed by brick. But if the owner of the plant has a store for the sale of bricks, then you can already ask if he did everything so that the brick does not fall into the hands of that man with crazy eyes, shaking hands and speaking “I will kill someone right now”?

This is me to the fact that we will not get simple answers in this story. But the process with the participation of Durov, if he nevertheless takes place, will set the direction in which the interaction of states, special services and large social networks will in the near future, where hundreds of millions of people from around the world are present. I am sure that the ideal formula will not work out and a compromise to which Durov will be forced, nobody will like it. But some rules of the game will be indicated.