Global Research

The French government’s arrest on 25 Aug. of Telegram’s founder, builder and operating manager, Pavel Durov, is a telling sign of these tumultuous times. It is alleged that France’s problematic President, Emmanuel Macron, lured Durov to Paris with a mafia-style dinner invitation. Durov became a citizen of France six years ago after Macron tried unsuccessfully to woo Telegram and its founder to set up business in France.

Durov is native of Russia, the world’s largest country in which the criminalized Big Tech martyr continues to have citizenship. Durov’s first internet triumph was VK which became Russia’s equivalent to Facebook. Rather than accept censorship as the Putin government demanded, Durov sold the company to find greener pastures.

Durov also is a citizen of United Arab Emirates where he lives and manages Telegram with his genius brother in Dubai. France sells much military hardware to UAE as part of a military alliance whose showpiece is the French naval base at Abu Dhabi.

The governments of both Russia and UAE have both intervened sternly, indicating they are paying close attention to to the Durov case. Both governments are making it clear that they will be vigilant in this matter in the name of safeguarding the integrity of their own national sovereignties. Both governments say they will not countenance any maltreatment by France’s of one of their most luminary citizens. Macron himself has been a regular user of Telegram because of its encryption capacities for private communications.

The importance of Telegram’s solid and hackproof encryption is a big part of the reason for pressing the vexatious case brought against Durov. All signs point to the finding that France is one of several players in a case developed at the highest levels by the most aggressive enemies of privacy and free speech on the Internet.

The sturdiness of Telegram’s encryption system is reflected by the fact that the Armed Forces of both Russia and NATO’s puppet Ukraine, regularly do their secret messaging through Durov’s company. Durov and his brother have built up Telegram’s ramparts against all sorts of spy wear, but especially the invasions on data bases facilitated by so-called backdoors, the digital nuke of Internet integrity.

One of Durov’s supposed crimes is to have stood up to the security state’s most aggressive thugs in denying them backdoor access to Telegram. All the other major platforms, including that of the Israeli government’s servile puppet, Elon Musk, have by now handed over the security keys to the likes of Mossad-CIA-MI6, the FBI, the US Department of Justice and a host of other Internet predators, public and private. Durov, however, is the main holdout. He hasn’t complied in the past. What will he do now?

The prolific development and placement of many types of backdoors throughout the Internet is a story in itself. The story begins with Inslaw Corp’s development throughout the late 1970s and 1980s of the PROMIS software. The PROMIS system added many tools to the arsenal of weapons enabling Internet surveillance even in the era before home computers and the widespread public embrace of the new communications technology. This revolutionary technology emerged from US military research and development at DARPA.

The digital suite of the PROMIS software could read secret computer data bases running on a variety of computer languages. There were many computer languages in that era. The homogenized data could be integrated to make it readily comprehensible especially for those engaged in police investigations and spying.

Israeli security forces stole the PROMIS software and then added features that resulted in their ability to construct full-fledged digital backdoors. Then they proceeded to sell the revised PROMIS software to spying agencies. Without realizing what they were doing, the purchasers inadvertently opened up their own digital operations to covert surveillance through invisible forms of backdoor penetration.

With the involvement of the notorious Mossad agent and media mogul, Robert Maxwell, PROMIS spyware was sold to dozens of countries and corporations. As Mike Ruppert discovered, the Canadian government’s spy divisions were a particularly avid yet naive customers of the Israeli-revised PROMIS system.

The many purchasers were not informed that their jazzy new spyware included backdoors that covertly unlocked access to their own data bases’ to secret inspection and downloading. The spreading of this backdoor system created many strategic advantages for the security state in Israel and also in China, which was early into this saga of rigging software to spy on the spies.

As epitomized by the activities of Jonathan Pollard, the United States has long been a major target of Israeli spying. Of course the US security state has long since developed its own collection of backdoor capacities. This proliferation of digital backdoors has dramatically altered the nature of the Internet.

 

The rise of large-scale Internet spying has created huge gaps between those with the capacities to install and read the digital output of backdoors and those who are the objects and victim of digital spying. In this Internet culture, the heroic and enlightened refusal of Durov to allow the secret insertion of backdoors on Telegram is a very big deal.

Power and Wealth as an Unsound Basis for Controlling the Operation of the World Wide Web

The arrest of Durov is rightly being interpreted by the attentive as yet another act of war against the freedom and wellbeing of average people. People throughout the world have good cause to embrace voluntary Internet sharing while seeking to outlaw Internet spying.

We have ample cause to resist the culture of mass surveillance executed and exploited by our predatory governors. Some of them are connected to well-documented initiatives devoted to trying to kill us, control us, enfeeble us, impoverish us, enslave us and to transform us by altering the character of our genetic constitutions.

This power grab through the ongoing omniwar against the largest part of humanity, is giving rise to new orders of organized crime well integrated into the activities of many so-called intelligence and police agencies. Some of the battles in the omniwar are being waged by the predators through lawfare. The injustices of lawfare will probably be on ample display in the Durov case.

The citizens of the globe have cause to push for a return to the ideal of the Internet as a neutral platform, not a weapon of censorship and propaganda that adds to the repressive clout of the world’s most powerful cartels and individuals. Until quite recently, there was a broad consensus that the Internet should be equally available to competing advocates and antagonists.

Some content regulation is necessary, but this oversight should not be conducted as it is now. It should not be conducted by agents of interested parties with agendas to push in the service of increasing the wealth and power of authoritarian clients. It should not be conducted to systematically, monolithically and across-the-board favour one side and demean the other side in warfare and political contests.

The old system of propaganda between place-based enemies does not mix well with the global, transnational character of the Internet.

The regulatory conditions should reflect and protect the principle that people have a fundamental human right to freely express themselves without censorship. The implementation of something close to this ideal would make available on the net something approaching the expression of a full array of human perspectives.

The state of the Internet currently does not come anywhere near the ideal of a level playing field.

The Internet should be adding to the quality and scope of our discourse. Unfortunately, however, the opposite is happening. We are being force fed, often surreptitiously, massive doses of toxic mind candy designed to induce thought control and indoctrination in order to tighten the political grip of our corrupt and self-centred governors.

Part of the censorship of the Internet is to cover up the fact that many governments, corporations, cartels and religious front organizations are engaged in various forms of terrorism, drug dealing, kiddie porn, child trafficking and many other forms of profitable but illegal activities. These crimes are prominent among the all-purpose justifications cited for the application of large-scale censorship. Don’t do what I do! Do what I say you must do!

Criminality at the top continues to grow because those who sink to the bottom levels of depravity in order to get ahead, are most prone to rise to the top. Those who rise to the top tend to exploit their positions to benefit in various ways, including by skimming off some of the proceeds of illegal activities.

While Durov and Telegram may stand on the edge of such activities, some of the officials in the intelligence agencies are participants in, and major beneficiaries of, such crimes. They stand at the pinnacle of today’s most sophisticated forms of organized crime. Durov is being set up as their fall guy.

Durov has faced this kind of abuse when his VK web site in Russia was publishing material created by activists who were critical of the Putin government. Durov has related the story of the photoshopped image placed in his Russian passport and his struggle to replace it with an unaltered rendition of himself.

 

[Fake] Photoshopped “Russian Passport Photo” Prepared by his Enemies to Picture Durov as a “Terrorist”

 Passport Photo of Durov

 

“Net neutrality” is the term originally coined to identify the Internet principle of equal treatment of all content providers and recipients of information. Until 2017, the year when US President Donald Trump converted to Judaism, the principle of net neutrality was embedded into the public policy in the USA. 

[See Klint Finley, “The Wired Guide to Net Neutrality, Wired,” May 2020]

Trump’s Federal Communication’s Commission abruptly shut down the USA’s net neutrality policy, thereby overturning the principle of the Internet as a shared public utility that should be equally accessible to all its users. (click on the underlined word to view link)

The attack on the Internet as a public utility has been fast and furious. The outcome has proven to be devastating in terms of the ongoing assault on the principles of supposedly free and democratic societies.

This effort to undermine Durov and outlaw Telegram in its present form takes one step further the vandalism against a core public resource belonging to “we the people.” It is nothing but a kleptocratic abomination deployed by power junkies to assert that they can join together to declare the Internet the proprietary object of their own private ownership. This theft of a global public resource must be condemned and resisted at every turn.

The Internet is the shared domain of all people that use it and own parts of the infrastructure, however small, of the most formidable communications tool ever invented.

A Kafkaesque Saga 

Durov spent two days in a Parisian jail before he and his lawyers negotiated bail terms. The government of France is holding him captive in Paris while he faces a trial that will probably exceed the ornate absurdity of any litigation dreamt up by the Czech novelist, Kafka. Obviously the leadership of UAE is not pleased that one of its prize entrepreneurial citizens is being held hostage elsewhere.

The basis of the Kafkaesque charges against Durov is that the Telegramsite has hosted criminal transactions. Durov, it is alleged, has therefore made himself complicit in the crimes of drug dealers, sex traffickers, pornographers, money launderers and terrorists who transact illegal business by taking advantage of Telegram’s secure encryption capacities.

Such allegations beg many questions about the role of the Western intelligence agencies that are most likely behind the government of France’s decisions to press criminal charges. Why have the FBI-DOJ, Mossad-CIA and their counterparts in France decided to single out Durov for special attention.

Why have the behind-the-scenes accusers decided to make a show trial of Durov’s case, when the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Big Tech executives are, for the present at least, exempt from the same kind of charge. Of course Facebook and Google have been developed and deployed as security state assets from their conception.

The new formula seems to be that those running Big Tech platforms whose managers accept massive censorship— whose managers allow copious backdoor leaks— get a pass from law enforcement. They are elevated to the realm of those above the law for helping to facilitate the criminality running rife in, for instance, the FBI that has made itself a Zionist servant of the Israel First Democratic Party

Once the public service principles of Internet usage were formally sabotaged, the takeover of the Internet quickly transformed it into a device devoted primarily to thought control in the service of power. Its main purpose seems to have made it a tool to facilitate the massive power grabs underway by some of world’s richest and most powerful cartels.

To be continued…

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This article was originally published on Looking out at the World from Canada.

Dr. Anthony Hall is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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