Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messenger, has promised to protect anonymity of users and freedom of change of information, including in Russia and Iran, according to Meduza.
“We don’t care that some countries have brought charges against us because we protect confidentiality of our users. We are always ready to break off both personal and business contacts with such places so that they will not have levers of pressure on us,” Durov noted.
He reportedly also stressed that restricting freedom of doing business, the authorities of Iran and Russia harm the economies of their countries.
According to him, Google, Oracle and Microsoft have closed their development offices in recent years and smaller companies have followed their lead.
Durov expressed hope that once Russia and Iran will reach a state that Telegram and other IT companies will be able to open their offices there. “Until that moment we will continue providing protection of correspondence of users from the places, where freedom is respected,” Durov stated.
Recall, Iran’s ISNA news agency, citing Tehran Prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi, reported this week that the Tehran Prosecutor’s Office has instituted criminal proceedings against Pavel Durov, the founder of the Telegram messenger.
Popularity of the application among fighters of the Islamic State terror group (ISIS, banned in Russia) was the cause. Also, according to the authorities of Iran, Telegram is actively used by human traffickers, drug dealers and pedophiles, ISNA reported.
Pavel Durov says he is surprised at Iranian prosecutor’s decision. According to him, moderators every day block thousands of channels and bots related to the banned contents. “I think, there is another background in the case”, he wrote on Twitter.
Earlier Tehran stated that the messenger moved several servers to Iran. Durov denied this information, noting that providers in Iran began to block calls through the messenger on April 16.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported on July 16 that Indonesia has limited access to the messaging app Telegram and threatened a total ban.
Pavel Durov reportedly said in a message to his 40,000 followers on Telegram that he’d been unaware of a failure to quickly respond to an Indonesian government request to block a number of offending channels — chat groups on the app — but was now rectifying the situation.
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on July 14 said it was preparing for the total closure of Telegram in Indonesia, where it has several million users, if it didn’t develop procedures to block unlawful content. As a partial measure, it asked internet companies in the world’s most populous Muslim nation to block access to 11 addresses offering the web version of Telegram.
Samuel Pangerapan, the director general of informatics applications at the ministry, said the app is used to recruit Indonesians into militant groups and to spread hate and methods for carrying out attacks including bomb making.
According to the Associated Press, suspected militants arrested by Indonesian police have told authorities that they communicated with each other via Telegram and received orders and directions to carry out attacks through the app, including from Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian with the Islamic State group in Syria accused of orchestrating several attacks in the past 18 months.
Durov said Telegram has now blocked the channels that were reported to it by the Indonesian government. Durov said Telegram blocks thousands of IS-related channels a month and is “always open to ideas on how to get better at this.”
Founded by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai in 2013, Telegram is a proprietary, non-profit cloud-based instant messaging service. Telegram client apps exist for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows NT, macOS and Linux. Users can send messages and exchange photos, videos, stickers, audio, and files of any type. Telegram also provides optional end-to-end-encrypted messaging.
The security of Telegram has faced notable scrutiny; critics have claimed that Telegram's security model is undermined by its use of a custom-designed encryption protocol that has not been proven reliable and secure, and by not enabling secure conversations by default. Telegram has also faced criticism for its wide-scale use by the ISIL terrorist organization.
