Telegram Founder’s Indictment Thrusts Encryption Into the Spotlight

When French prosecutors charged Pavel Durov, the chief executive of the messaging app Telegram, with a litany of criminal offenses on Wednesday, one accusation stood out to Silicon Valley companies.

Telegram, French authorities said in a statement, had provided cryptology services aimed at ensuring confidentiality without a license.

In other words, the topic of encryption was being thrust into the spotlight.

The cryptology charge raised eyebrows at U.S. tech companies including Signal, Apple and Meta’s WhatsApp, according to three people with knowledge of the companies. These companies provide end-to-end encrypted messaging services and often stand together when governments challenge their use of the technology, which keeps online conversations between users private and secure from outsiders.

But while Telegram is also often described as an encrypted messaging app, it tackles encryption differently than WhatsApp, Signal and others. So if Mr. Durov’s indictment turned Telegram into a public exemplar of the technology, some Silicon Valley companies believe that could damage the credibility of encrypted messaging apps writ large, according to the people, putting them in a tricky position of whether to rally around their rival.

“If we assume this becomes a fight about encryption, it is kind of bad to have a defendant who looks irresponsible,” said Daphne Keller, who directs the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.

Encryption has been a long-running point of friction between governments and tech companies around the world. For years, tech companies have argued that encrypted messaging is crucial to maintain people’s digital privacy, while law enforcement and governments have said that the technology enables illicit behaviors by hiding illegal activity.

The debate has grown more heated as encrypted messaging apps have become mainstream. Signal has grown by tens of millions of users since its founding in 2018. Apple’s iMessage is installed on the hundreds of millions of iPhones that the company sells each year. WhatsApp is used by more than two billion people globally.

These apps are encrypted by default, which means that users’ conversations are immediately private the moment they start chatting. They also have end-to-end encryption, which scrambles messages in such a way that they can be deciphered only by the sender and the intended recipient.

In the past, Mr. Durov has championed Telegram’s security as above that of its peers. He called the app’s “secret chat” feature “the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private” in a post to his personal Telegram channel in May.

But unlike WhatsApp, Signal and Apple’s iMessage, Telegram requires users to manually opt into encryption through a hard-to-find setting within the app. That setting is offered only in one-to-one conversations on Telegram, even as many people use the service to join groups that can include hundreds of thousands of people.

The quality of Telegram’s encryption has also been debated by security experts. Signal has made its software code viewable to the public, so that anyone can check the encryption for vulnerabilities. Telegram does not offer the same transparency and it is unclear how strong its encryption is.

“A lot of Telegram’s users thought the landlord didn’t have a key to their apartment,” said John Scott-Railton, a security researcher at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog at the University of Toronto. “They’re now discovering that the company actually has keys for four out of five of their rooms.”

That has frustrated U.S. tech executives, who said that Mr. Durov had played into the public’s lack of understanding of encryption to bolster Telegram’s image as a secure place to communicate.

Apple, WhatsApp and Signal declined to comment on Mr. Durov and Telegram.

Apple, WhatsApp and Signal have regularly gone to court or fought high-profile battles with governments to protect encryption. Last year, WhatsApp threatened to pull out of Britain if lawmakers approved a measure ordering it to remove encryption from its app. Meredith Whittaker, the president of Signal, also said last year that the company would “absolutely 100 percent walk” away from providing the service in Britain if it were forced to weaken the app’s security.

And in 2020, Apple pushed back against an F.B.I. request that the company break its encryption in order to access data on two iPhones that belonged to a gunman who opened fire at a naval base in Florida.

The European Union has been debating a new law that would require messaging services to scan for photos and links to detect possible child sexual abuse material, which has raised alarms among encryption supporters.

Silicon Valley executives are now watching Mr. Durov’s case closely for the French authorities’ next moves on encryption. Some of the tech companies were surprised by the cryptology charge because it was unclear to them that a license was needed in France for the technology.

Apart from the encryption charge, Mr. Durov, who was barred from leaving France, was also indicted with complicity in managing an online platform to enable illegal transactions by an organized group, complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and fraud, and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement.

His case has led to a debate about whether Telegram’s less robust standards for encryption contributed to French authorities so heavily scrutinizing the platform. Harmful and illicit material on Telegram is often out in the open, whereas the contents of conversations on WhatsApp and Signal are only available to the sender and recipient of a message.

“Telegram is one of the few services that is not end-to-end encrypted by default,” said Zach Judge-Raza, a British barrister at Fieldfisher who specializes in data and privacy issues related to national security laws. “That could have been part of its downfall because everything is out in the open for everyone to see.”

If the history of tech is any guide and encryption increasingly becomes a focus in Mr. Durov’s case, Silicon Valley firms could eventually speak up to defend private messaging — even if it means rallying behind an imperfect messenger in Telegram.

“I wish I could say it was a settled debate that more security is better,” Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “I think encryption is still under threat in parts of the world.”

Adam Satariano contributed reporting from London.