Two of the six charges facing Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in France are grounded an obscure, never-used twenty-year-old law obliging companies providing cryptography tools to inform the French Cybersecurity Agency (French acronym ANSSI) and grant it access to the software’s source code and “a description of [its] technical characteristics.”
The 2004 law – uniquely blunt in its demand that companies divulge info about the tech tools used for private communications, is being used against Durov by accusing him of providing encrypted communications services “without certified declaration.”
Adding credence to this idea is the fact that Pavel Durov is reportedly the first-ever tech mogul to be charged under the 2004 law, and the fact that many big-name tech companies have been silent on the Durov case, with the exception of Proton CEO Andy Yen, who characterized the charges against the Russian-born tech mogul as “economic suicide” that’s “rapidly and permanently changing the perception of founders and investors” toward France.
“If sustained, I don’t see how tech founders could possibly travel to France, much less hire in France,” Yen wrote last week.
The law is also reminiscent of the case against WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange, who was threatened with decades of jail time by the US under the obscure Espionage Act of 1917, even though that he was not an American citizen, and a publisher, not a spy. Former president Donald Trump was charged under the same act in his classified documents case, which got thrown out by a judge in July.