In 2013, Edward Snowden drew international attention to some of the depths of the surveillance programs of the US National Security Agency (NSA). Snowden’s actions, which the US government has called espionage and treason, unquestionably caused great harm to US intelligence gathering. However, it also made the American public, to whom the US government is supposed to be responsible, aware of PRISM, MUSCULAR, and dozens of other collection programs. They also revealed the abiding interest of the world’s governments in spying on their own citizens. Many criticized the NSA programs as unconstitutional, but there’s neither evidence that anything has changed nor that anybody running the show has been held to account. In the years since, it seems clear that the interest of the world’s governments in surveillance has only grown. Governments are working to enlist the aid of companies who are willing to spy on their behalf, and applying pressure to companies who resist their demands.

The latest salvo in this effort seems to be the recent arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of popular instant messaging provider Telegram. France accuses Telegram of failing to cooperate on investigations of drug trafficking and child sexual content. Taking for granted for a moment that Telegram does provide strong encryption, it’s worth remembering that the entire model for such encryption would preclude Telegram doing much to “cooperate”. You may recall that last year competing secure messaging platforms Signal and WhatsApp told the UK’s regulator, Ofcom, they would leave the country entirely rather than weaken their encryption. We think this latest move is calculated to make standing against the world surveillance state more personally risky.

For the record, we must mention that Telegram is shockingly far from being a secure system. Johns Hopkins cryptographer Matthew Green highlighted in a recent blog post that Telegram’s encryption is fully proprietary (usually a bad idea), and notes that strong encryption is off by default, and maddeningly difficult to turn on… even for experts. Notwithstanding, about a month after Durov’s arrest, Telegram announced that it would release customer IP addresses and phone numbers to inquiries from legitimate legal authorities. There’s no doubt that Telegram and other secure messaging services are frequently used by bad actors to transfer cryptocurrency, distribute malware, and coordinate illegal enterprises. The law enforcement and intelligence work refers to the growth in the use of strong encryption as the going dark problem. They argue that surveillance is necessary to combat crime and terrorism. They also argue that those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear from their surveillance.

The question for society is whether we’ll allow them to spy on all of us to catch a few bad actors among us. All that this still-unfolding meta-plot does for us is increase our interest in strong security services that do not rely on untrusted intermediaries.