00:01:15.120We're going to start with what happened in France over the weekend.
00:01:18.080The CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, I'm sure you guys have heard of this story by now,
00:01:22.540who's arrested, allegedly, according to reports.
00:01:25.500It's caused an uproar among, I would say, people on our side of the aisle, but even the New York Times is saying that this is sort of a new battle over free speech,
00:01:34.340the age-old platform versus publisher debate.
00:01:36.640So no better person to bring on to break it down than Darren J. Beattie, Dr. Darren J. Beattie, I should add.
00:01:42.340But, Darren, I have a clip that we'll play after of Pavel talking to Tucker from an old segment talking about the sort of FBI's efforts to make outreach to Telegram.
00:01:51.460But before we get into that, can you just sort of give us your opening thoughts on what has transpired?
00:01:57.580Well, first of all, honor, as always, to be here with you, Natalie.
00:02:04.440And, yes, this is a very important development on a very important theme running through, say, the last eight or nine years,
00:02:12.460and that is the sort of cat-and-mouse game of censorship and censored.
00:02:18.260So what happened in a nutshell, Pavel Durov, CEO and founder of Telegram, which is a major encrypted messaging app,
00:02:26.620who is a citizen of France and actually got his citizenship on the basis of some kind of eminent citizen category.
00:02:34.520So he's being celebrated by France for his achievements in creating this app and then ultimately was arrested.
00:02:42.240They claim, if you look at the charges, they're, oh, distributing child pornography and drug trafficking, all these kinds of crazy things.
00:02:50.380But what it amounts to is charging him for things that happen on his platform and punishing him because, presumably,
00:02:58.420he is not as forthcoming and accommodating to state actors that want him to either censor information on his platform
00:03:08.460or provide information about people to authorities when it is unjustified.
00:03:15.020And so this is a major escalation of this kind of arms race between the censors, the censorious forces of the state and the people.
00:03:27.280And it's important to take stock of where we were before this escalation,
00:03:31.340because I've always described 2020 as kind of a high watermark for conventional censorship.
00:03:37.820That was when they censored, you know, the Hunter Biden laptop and you had the FBI pressuring Facebook, pressuring Twitter,
00:03:44.780all the stuff that came out in the Twitter files, basically retrospectively revealing just how integral censorship was to that particular time.
00:04:27.780And their next move was, well, if we can't censor in the traditional way, we're going to have to start throwing people in prison.
00:04:35.320And a paradigmatic case of that here in the United States that we've covered extensively is, of course,
00:04:40.500the felony charge against American citizen Douglas Mackey,
00:04:44.040who was convicted of a felony under a innovative interpretation and construal of an old statute,
00:04:50.920basically codifying the disinformation scam that they can no longer use as effectively as a pretext for censoring online because Elon took over.
00:05:16.520And so basically they're starting to criminalize the most egregious cases of speech they don't like because they're no longer able to de-platform people and censor people in a traditional context.
00:05:30.080And I think what Durov represents is an escalation of this on the sort of level of the founder, level of the oligarch.
00:05:38.260And, of course, in the backdrop of all of this is Elon Musk, who's also at odds with EU and EU officials precisely because he refuses to censor Twitter in compliance with the EU censorship demand.
00:05:54.540So many, I think, are with justification speculating this.
00:05:58.360This arrest of Durov represents the next chess move and a possible precedent for how they intend to go after Elon and other figures who might be more favorable to free speech.
00:06:11.880Well, if free speech people are taking over tech platforms and refuse to censor the way we want, we're just going to arrest them directly.
00:06:19.460And so it's a very dangerous and troubling escalation of these ongoing censorship wars, not to mention the kind of meta significance of what it says about geopolitics.
00:06:32.260You know, Durov is an interesting figure.
00:06:34.680He is, even though he's a Russian national, there's no love lost between him and the Putin regime.
00:06:40.280He refused to censor and give up information that Putin wanted.
00:06:43.900So he was famously kind of exiled and had a middle finger, you know, moment to Putin.
00:06:50.320So, basically, he tried this experiment of can you be this free agent, this free actor living as a kind of neutral, principled defender of free speech and sort of triangulating between all of these great powers and their intelligence agencies that are trying to get him to compromise his platform to their advantage.
00:07:11.320And he tried that out even where he lived, like Dubai, the UAE has kind of emerged as this interesting sort of geopolitical Switzerland in a way in a time of intense polarization between sort of the Russia, China sphere and the U.S. sphere.
00:07:27.960And so there's this secondary meta significance to his arrest, which is kind of that this neutrality experiment has not exactly worked out.
00:07:41.040So a lot of interesting things, a lot of very relevant things to us and everybody who cares about, you know, being able to speak freely online and in other venues.
00:07:50.240Yeah, War Room has a huge presence on Telegram and we're certainly not going anywhere.
00:07:55.240But I find the whole situation, I think, kind of analogous to what the Chinese Communist Party tried to do with Jack Ma, making an example out of him, what he was doing with Alibaba.
00:08:04.300And I think, honestly, we will come in the next few days to see that the United States government was probably intimately involved in a lot of this crackdown on Durov, on, you know, free speech, not just at home, but abroad.
00:08:16.600But I think it sort of brings me to my next question for you, which before you answer, Denver, if we can roll the clip.
00:08:21.740But just real quick, you know, I think the question is why, right, are they going after Telegram?
00:08:27.000And it's because they don't play the censorship game that all these other ostensibly private social media companies do.
00:08:33.600But you have Alexander Vindman tweeting over the weekend, and I quote, Musk should be nervous, right, in response to this arrest.
00:08:42.080And I think that that nervousness comes from what you'll see in this clip, this unwillingness, right, to sort of do the bidding of, in this case, the United States government.
00:08:50.280Denver, let's roll this interview with Tucker.
00:08:51.780Denver, we got too much attention from the FBI, the security agencies, wherever we came to the U.S.
00:09:00.940So to give you an example, last time I was in the U.S., I brought an engineer that is working for Telegram,
00:09:09.000and there was an attempt to secretly hire my engineer behind my back by cyber security officers or agents, wherever they are called.
00:09:19.600The U.S. government should hire your engineer?
00:09:24.580To write code for them or to break into Telegram?
00:09:28.240They were curious to learn which open source libraries are integrated to the Telegram's app, you know, on the client side.
00:09:37.020And they were trying to persuade him to use certain open source tools that he would then integrate into the Telegram's code that, in my understanding, would serve as backdoors.
00:09:51.340Would allow the U.S. government to spy on people who use Telegram.
00:09:55.280The U.S. government or maybe any other government, because a backdoor is a backdoor, regardless of who is using it.
00:11:39.820I mean, this is an example of this refusal to cooperate not only with the United States that wants to get in on his platform and exploit, you know, backdoors and things, but also Russia.
00:11:51.320That's why he wasn't living in Russia at the time.
00:11:53.220So, again, it's this interesting kind of experiment to rebuff the entreaties and machinations of all of the major intelligence services and, you know, try to live in a place like UAE, which is sort of has this interesting, you know, geopolitical neutrality that's emerged, especially since the sanctions regime intensified on Russia.
00:12:17.260And he thought he was safe in France where he had citizenship and evidently not.
00:12:23.240And so the questions that remain is exactly what was going on.
00:12:28.920I rather doubt that France was acting alone.
00:12:32.520Were they acting at the behest of some other government?
00:12:35.400And if so, which government and exactly why?
00:12:38.880It's also worth pointing out that Telegram is a major, if not the predominant source of unmediated and unfiltered content directly from conflict zones.
00:12:54.720A lot of things that have been embarrassing, including, you know, undeniable footage showing that the Western powers have boots on the ground to major leaks that they've published that have been embarrassing to parties in the Israel-Gaza conflict.
00:13:11.320And so this idea that Telegram is this source of unfiltered and unmediated content from very hot button geopolitical hot button conflict zones, I'm sure that's also been the source of tremendous pressure and tremendous frustration on the part of numerous intelligence agencies across the globe.
00:13:34.520So it's a tough goal that Durov has set for himself to maintain a genuinely neutral and privacy-focused platform.
00:13:46.400And it looks like he's paying the price for that noble goal.
00:13:50.880And, Darren, we're going to have to have you back on tomorrow to go through the latest on the pipe bomb hoax.
00:13:55.640But until then, if people want to stay up to date with your analysis, where can they go?
00:13:59.480Revolver, you personally, to get all that.
00:14:02.680At Darren J. Beattie on X and Revolver.News.
00:14:07.360We're following this Durov thing closely.
00:14:09.220Again, it's not just about this enigmatic CEO who was arrested.
00:14:14.080There are a lot of extremely interesting and critically important meta elements of this that pertain not only to censorship but geopolitics as such.
00:14:24.540So follow Revolver.News for all the latest on this important story.
00:14:28.460You know, anytime they're wheeling out Vindman to do their bidding, it's not a good sign.
00:14:33.020I think the first impeachment of Donald Trump should serve as a nice reminder.
00:46:14.480DHS is a branch called HSI Homeland Security Investigations whose job it is to infiltrate
00:46:21.480and recruit and groom informants or, you know, were bad actors essentially and set them up for crimes.
00:46:28.480So it's quite possible that HSI agents at that range may have befriended crooks.
00:46:35.480And then in order to in order to evade any kind of scrutiny later in time about the communications
00:46:41.480they were having with the would be shooter simply told them to use an encrypted messaging
00:46:45.480app. So I'm not alleging that to be the case, but this would be an easy way for it to be structured in
00:46:51.480order to evade federal fingerprints on the assassination attempt.
00:46:56.480But again, getting back to the sort of arrest of Pavel and its implications.
00:47:01.480I have been pointing to the necessity of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to bring in for questioning and subpoena the documents from the U.S.
00:47:10.480embassy in Paris because it is my contention that there is no way hell would sooner freeze
00:47:16.480over before France would unilaterally arrest the founder and the guy who unilaterally runs
00:47:23.480telegram without at least notifying, let alone coordinating, getting permission from the U.S.
00:51:35.480We're bringing it back exclusive for the War Room Posse here, promo code War Room.
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