the censorship and surveillance state flexes

france arrests telegram CEO for failing to help them spy on customers

in no small irony, pavel durov, the russian founder of the widely used text messaging system telegram, who fled russia to avoid interference in his business and the privacy of his users has been arrested. in france. because make no mistake, the EU has become the point of the spear on intrusive mandate that all media, social media, and communications must be subject to the state and to the supra-national groups that organize it. the EU has done nothing but push mandates for surveillance and censorship, for hate speech and “misinformation” which increasingly has come to mean “any facts we don’t like.”

he made the (extremely unwise) choice to allow his private jet to land in france for reasons unknown. i suspect there’s a story there as he’s not a fool and must have known what would happen.

the french cops swooped, he’s now jailed, and facing 20 years for the heinous crime of “allowing people to speak privately to one another in a manner the EU cannot readily surveil.”

governments have been pressuring him to allow their police and intelligence groups access for years.

the west has become what we used to vilify china and the soviets for.

durov has repeatedly said refused to censor and spy and moved to dubai to escape their reach because he wants to “run a neutral platform.”

those seeking free speech are being chased to dubai. dubai. seriously, let that one sink in for a moment.

but returning to the west resulted in the (however you say “gestapo” in french) snatching him and tossing him in prison.

the setup is basically this:

"He made a blunder this evening. We don’t know why … Was this flight just a stopover? In any case, he’s in custody!" a source close to the investigation told the news outlet (translated by Google).

Durav was detained by the National Anti-Fraud Office (ONAF), over the alleged facilitation of various crimes including terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and fraud.

"On his platform, he allowed an incalculable number of offences and crimes to be committed, for which he did nothing to moderate or cooperate," a source told TF1 TV.

telegram is a system of (sometimes) end to end encrypted channels (it can be a little wobbly on this). it can be individual (1 to 1) or groups/subscriptions that lead to one to many.

used properly, it’s not monitored or monitorable and, perhaps worse, it creates a huge steganography problem for would be snoops as it generates a large amount of encrypted traffic bouncing all over between users in complex and unpredictable webs that make finding any particular grain on sand on this beach far more difficult.

this is clearly a state intolerable to the EU.

they were deadly serious about “in the future you will have no privacy” and they mean to make it the cornerstone of transnational law.

their DSA and DMA legislation creates an affirmative requirement for digital media companies to comply and do as they are told to gag and monitor and spy upon whomever the unelected officials tell them to. no choice. no outs.

this stands as the diametric opposite of the US idea of the US and section 230, “the 26 words that created the internet.”

the EU is taking the inverse tack which is “hell yes you are responsible for every single thing that every single person writes on any system you provide them.”

this is how you destroy everyhting. all innovation, all privacy. it’s not a coincidence that the EU cannot produce any real internet champions outside of spotify which is basically a regulation play.

the US has obviously found lots of ways to flout 230 or pretend it’s all “friendly and consensual” in the sense of “get in line or we’ll destroy you” being a free choice among friends, but the EU is not even playing at innocent. they are outright saying “we rule here, do what we say, no questions, it’s the law.”

the EU have been sabre rattling, now they are starting to strike and this is the time to lean in HARD because if this gets rolling, it’s never going to stop.

the EU and its trans-national and globalist agenda is on the ropes. people have had it and they are getting loud about it. elections are being lost. protest and counter government speech are rising. unfettered immigration of “Very Stabby and Rapey People” is causing a real societal problem and movements are rising in opposition and in protection of cultures and societal norms. the EU does not want this. and they will fight hard. and they will fight dirty.

the US feels much the same but has a few more restrictions. it’s a trickier fight here, but make no mistake about what these people want.

they are flat out telling you.

you would do well to believe them.

the same people who told you lock down, mask up, 6 feet apart, safe and effective, mostly peaceful, russian disinfo, and 400 other weapon’s grade whoppers want the right to decide what is “misinformation” and to censor it.

they claim you have no right to speak it.

it’s a pretty astonishing take.

“shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;”

has become “unless we disagree with what you say.”

most social media in the US has stayed in lapdog mode. meta has. google is full vichy. elon seems poised to fight and he’s got some advantages others do not. he owns a satellite internet constellation (used by US military and US allies), the rockets to launch more, and a space company the federal government just had to come to hat in hand to get the NASA astronauts back from space. he’s about as close to untouchable and uncancelable as a human can get today.

it will not be enough.

they’ll eventually get him anyway by hook or by crook.

and so we must evolve.

i predicted this in my seminal substack and i stand by it:

the problem is in the design and if we would stay free and private, we need new systems.

government cannot save us from this. we must save ourselves.

it’s time we abandoned the misbegotten idea of “too important to be left to free markets” and realized that creating the real public square, commerce, money, and internet are too important NOT to be left to free markets. there is no one we can trust to control these systems, so we must design systems that are not controlled by anyone.

it will be so ubiquitous and intertwined with money and investment and markets and media that you will struggle to tell one from another as they will conjoin into one tissue protected by strong encryption and massive distributed redundancy. there will be no one who controls it and no “off” switch. the concept of censorship will be rendered anachronistic.

the problem with this plan is metcalfe’s law. the value of a network is the square of its nodes. you cannot just “move to mammoth” and have anything useful. the debate is not there. the content is not there. it is not an agora with sufficient scale to matter. social media is dominated by a critical mass equation. nothing, nothing, nothing, then you reach a scale where “fission” and suddenly the energy is unbounded.

but how do we get there? building from scratch is crazy hard.

to my mind, the best solution is this: change twitter/X.

open it. make it a protocol not a company. make it peer to peer, not centralized. encrypt it all. then let it go so it is controlled by no one.

change the business model. musk should move to:

• payments and a neo banking system that can accomplish what all the faltering crypto currencies and their stagnant “layer 2’s” always 2 years away from “lightning solving this” never could: anonymous, private, scalable commerce, savings, and investment. make it into the everyhting market with competing digital currencies and trusted counterparties where commerce can be behind firewalls.

• hardware. the world desperately needs a new smartphone not run by google or apple. something that’s secure and optimized for the coming peer to peer world. something that is not 60% spyware by weight. a phone you can trust. a phone that can be a trusted node.

these two opportunities dwarf anything an ad or subscription based twitter could ever be. and it solves the layer one problem. the astonishing power of a network of internet by satellite and billion terrestrial phone nodes optimized to extend it into one vast ubiquitous mesh could be transformative. it could place the ball well and truly out of leviathan’s reach once and for all.

no “company” can stand against the state as champion of free speech for long. they are too determined and they will keep coming, keep changing laws, making laws, arresting people, shutting things down.

we need to move where they cannot follow, where they cannot see, where the cannot matter.

this is the path. there is no other.

i said it in my first stack and i’ll say it again here:

it’s time to move out of the house. it’s time for the internet to end its awkward adolescence and realize its promise.

it’s time for information, conversation, agora, money, and commerce to transcend the grasping tentacles of the dying giant we one mistook for government.

LFG.