Cover photo: ©Marcel Top
On August 24 last year, a Russian tech billionaire Pavel Durov was arrested by French authorities shortly after landing on the Le Bourget Airport just north of Paris. After exiling Russia in 2021, Durov, the founder-CEO of Telegram, an instant messaging app that has mainstreamed end-to-end encrypted communications on mobile phones, gained French citizenship in a fast-track procedure. Now, he faced 11 charges, including complicity in drug trafficking, child sexual exploitation, and organized money laundering, which amounted to 20 years in prison in France.
While the Telegram CEO had long been pressured by governments worldwide to allow them backdoors to snoop into his app’s encrypted message flow, French President Emmanuel Macron was quick to stress there was “no political motivation” for his arrest. However, the four days in French custody were enough to persuade Durov to rewrite Telegram’s policy and inform the company’s roughly one billion users that it would start sharing user information, including their phone numbers and IP addresses, with state authorities upon a valid legal request.
According to a crowd-sourcing project that aggregates Telegram’s data handovers to governments, the cases immediately skyrocketed globally: In France, for example, there were only ten cases during the first half of 2024 where Telegram shared user information with state agencies. By the end of September, the number had already risen to 210. In the last quarter of the year, the French authorities submitted yet another 673 requests about 1,386 users. Similar exponential growth was documented around the world, including in Germany, India, Italy, and the United States.
The fate of Telegram is just the tip of the iceberg of governments’ increasing appetite to exploit the massive stores of data that digital service providers extract from their users. Proton AG, a Swiss vendor of encrypted communication tools, recently analyzed the transparency reports from Google, Apple, and Meta to conclude that the number of “government intrusions” had multiplied in the past decade: the US authorities alone demanded information about 3.1 million people, resulting in 600% growth in annual requests between 2014 and 2024. Europe, on the other hand, witnessed a 1,300% rise during the same period.
While marketing Proton as a privacy-friendly alternative to “Big Tech,” the company-aligned research concluded on an ambiguously conciliatory note: “Every company must comply with the laws of the land that governs them.” According to its own transparency reports, Proton received 11,023 legal orders in 2024 (and complied in 94% of the cases), a staggering 42,296% increase from the 26 cases it faced back in 2017.
While digital surveillance is often advanced with arguments about suppressing child porn, drug trafficking, or terrorism—as exemplified in Telegram’s case—governments have built the legal frameworks and technical means to spy upon and interfere with digital communications way beyond these causes. It is increasingly difficult even for supposedly privacy-friendly corporations such as Proton in supposedly privacy-friendly jurisdictions such as Switzerland to avoid being dragged—to one degree or another—to the global digital surveillance machine. And, as Donald Trump’s recent re-election has shown, in the absence of strong digital privacy rights, the sudden changes of political winds largely define how these technical powers are deployed against society.
In this month’s edition, Mohammad Shamandafar reports from Jordan where a modern Cybercrime Law came to force in 2023. The law, which penalizes a variety of vague offenses ranging from “promoting, instigating, aiding or inciting immorality” to “provoking strife,” and “undermining national unity,” has been a key tool in suppressing civil society and the widespread pro-Palestinian movement during the genocide in Israeli-occupied Palestine right across its borders. According to Amnesty International, “hundreds” of activists and organizers have been charged under the Cybercrime law.
“Censorship and self-censorship are proceeding hand in hand— with the Cybercrime Law fueling both at the same time,” Shamandafar concludes about the law which gives sweeping powers for the Kingdom’s intelligence agencies to spy upon its citizens and opposition.
Similar vague policies are enforced in other countries, such as the United States, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently ordered all foreign officers to conduct “mandatory social media checks” and “enhanced screening” for visa applicants to root out anyone with “a hostile attitude toward US citizens or US culture.” In European countries, phone and social network scans have become a routine task in practically any type of investigation.
The so-called social media, which were hailed as trailblazers of free digital communications, appear more and more distant from their promises as the companies are aligning themselves with governments, either willingly or by force, like Telegram or Proton. Some, like Elon Musk’s X, have openly turned into politically controlled platforms, where accounts are suspended or silenced for criticizing the governing circles.
The demand for free digital media and communications has not, however, been silenced. The non-profit encrypted communications app Signal, for example, saw a massive spike in downloads after it was revealed that top US officials used it (illegally) to share updates of ongoing air raids in Yemen. Signal Messenger ranked in top-downloaded apps not only in Yemen but also in other countries such as the Netherlands.
Similar mass exodus from commercial platforms have coincided with other high-publicity controversies. In the last five years or so, all major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and X, have found their alternative counterparts pop up: free and open-source platforms like Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Peertube. In mid-month, Sara A. de Ceano-Vivas Núñez will report on how these platforms—collectively titled the Fediverse—differ from corporate social networks and to what extent they are creating an alternative, healthier version of their commercial equivalents.
While some decade ago it was predicted that social networks would overshadow journalistic press, the resulting explosion of disinformation, algorithmic manipulation and control, and government-orchestrated influence campaigns have highlighted the need for truly independent, principled, and reliable information channels. Toward the end of the month, we will explore two avenues outside of social networks: the potential of free media and the proliferation of spyware.
Gaia Guatri and Shekufe Ranjbar write about podcasts, specifically how an emergent scene of Chinese podcasters has been able to challenge the state’s strict governmental control over both conventional media as well as social networks. With over 170,000 Chinese-language podcasts and a rapidly growing listener base, China is on track to become the world’s largest podcast producer, and these online debates—on gender, labor, mental health, and other topics—are increasingly spinning out of the government’s control.
Valentina Ramanand and Henri Sulku, on the other hand, report on commercial spyware, the controversial industry that develops and sells tools whose sole purpose is digital espionage, including cracking device protections, firewalls, and encrypted communications. The ongoing five-year legal battle between Meta and the Israeli spyware vendor NSO Group, has taken new turns. Some commentators have even titled the litigation as a potential death blow to the developer of the notorious Pegasus virus which is believed to have been used to spy on tens of thousands of civil society figures. But does the conflict between the tech giants mark a real rupture in the surveillance complex? To what extent can Meta, one of the biggest extractors of user data in the world, claim the fight for online freedom and privacy?
Navigating the risks and opportunities that advances in digital communications open up for our societies, at Turning Point, our mission is clear: to be part of building the free, principled, and independent media that our highly mediated and digitized societies need.
As more and more media outlets and social networks fall under the control of reactionary billionaires and governing circles, we firmly believe this is among the key freedom struggles in the digital realm: a battle that takes place on an everyday basis inside social networks, within their alternatives, as well as through other ways and formats, including the magazine of ours.
If you want to support Turning Point in this struggle, you can share our stories in your networks, pitch and write for us, link us to your photo portfolio, or become a donor. Or you can simply email us and propose what we could do and how we could fight together.
