the censorship and surveillance state bends

In no small irony, the Russian founder of the widely used text messaging system Telegram, Pavel Durov, who fled Russia to avoid interference in his business and the privacy of his users, has been arrested in France. For make no mistake, the EU has become the spearhead with an intrusive mandate that all media, social media and communications be subject to the state and the supranational groups that organize it. The EU has done nothing but push mandates for surveillance and censorship, for hate speech and “disinformation,” which has increasingly come to mean “and facts we don’t like.”

He made the (very unwise) choice to land his private jet in France for reasons unknown. I suspect there is a story behind it, because he is not stupid and must have known what would happen.

French police intervened and he is now in custody, facing up to 20 years in prison for the heinous crime of “allowing people to talk to each other in private in a way that the EU cannot simply monitor.”

Governments have been pressuring him for years to grant access to their police and intelligence services.

The West has become what we once vilified China and the Soviets for.

Durov has repeatedly said that he refused to censor and spy and that he moved to Dubai to escape their influence because he “wants to run a neutral platform.”

People seeking freedom of speech are being chased to Dubai. Dubai. Think about that for a moment.

but when he returned to the West he was seized by the (however you say “gestapo” in French) and thrown in prison.

the setup is in principle this:

“He made a blunder tonight. We don’t know why… Was this flight just a stopover? Either way, he’s stuck!” a source close to the investigation told the news outlet (translated by Google).

Durav was detained by the National Anti-Fraud Office (ONAF) on suspicion of facilitating various crimes, including terrorism, drug trafficking and fraud.

“On his platform, He has permitted countless transgressions and crimes to occur, and has done nothing to mitigate or cooperate with them.“, a source told TF1 TV.

Telegram is a system of end-to-end encrypted channels. It can be individual (1 to 1) or groups/subscriptions leading to one to many.

It is not monitored or controlled and, perhaps worse, it creates a huge steganographic problem for potential snoops, as it generates a huge amount of encrypted traffic that bounces back and forth between users in complex and unpredictable networks, making it much harder to find a particular grain of sand on this beach.

This is clearly a situation that is unacceptable for the EU.

They were deadly serious about “in the future you will have no privacy” and they plan to make this the cornerstone of transnational law.

Their DSA and DMA legislation creates a positive requirement for digital media companies to play by the rules and do what they’re told: muzzle, surveil, and spy on anyone their unelected officials tell them to do. No choice. No exclusion.

this is diametrically opposed to the American idea of ​​the US and Section 230, “the 26 words that created the Internet.”

The EU takes the opposite course, namely: “Yes, you are responsible for everything someone writes on whatever system you offer him or her.”

That’s how you destroy everything. All innovation, all privacy. It’s no coincidence that the EU can’t produce real internet champions outside of Spotify, which is essentially a rules game.

the US has clearly found many ways to circumvent 230 or pretend that it is all “friendly and consensual” in the sense of “get in line or we will destroy you” as a free choice among friends, but the EU is not even playing innocent. they are outright saying “we rule here, do as we say, no questions asked, it’s the law.”

The EU has been brandishing weapons, now they are starting to strike and this is the time to act HARD because once this starts it will never stop.

the EU and its transnational and globalist agenda are on the ropes. people have had enough and they are loudly reporting it. elections are being lost. protests and anti-government speeches are increasing. unbridled immigration of “very stabbing and raping people” is causing a real social problem and movements are emerging in opposition and to protect cultures and societal norms. the EU does not want this. and they will fight hard. and they will fight dirty.

The US feels much the same way, but it has a few more restrictions. It’s a tougher fight here, but make no mistake about what these people want.

They tell you straight out.

You would do well to believe them.

The same people who told you to lock down, wear a mask, stay 6 feet apart, be safe and effective, be largely peaceful, spread Russian disinformation, and be 400 other weapons-grade assholes want the right to define what is “disinformation” and censor it.

They claim you have no right to say it.

It’s a pretty astonishing take on the matter.

“make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;”

has become: “unless we disagree with what you say.”

Most social media in the US has remained in lapdog mode. Meta has. Google is all messed up. Elon seems ready to fight, and he has a few advantages that others don’t. He owns a satellite internet network (used by the US military and US allies), the rockets to launch more, and a space company that the federal government just had to step in to bring NASA astronauts back from space. He’s about as untouchable and unkillable as a person gets these days.

it won’t be enough.

They’ll get him eventually, one way or another.

and so we must evolve.

i predicted this in my groundbreaking substack and I stick to it:

The problem is in the design. If we want to remain free and private, we need new systems.

The government can’t save us from this. We have to save ourselves.

it is time we let go of the failed idea of ​​”too important to leave to the free market” and realize that creating the true public square, commerce, money, and the internet are too important NOT to leave to the free market. there is no one we can trust to control these systems, so we must design systems that are controlled by no one.

it will be so ubiquitous and so intertwined with money and investments and markets and media that you will have a hard time telling them apart because they will blend into a single fabric protected by strong encryption and massive distributed redundancy. there will be no one to control it and no “off” switch. the concept of censorship will be anachronistic.

the problem with this plan is metcalfe’s law. the value of a network is the square of its nodes. you can’t just “move to mammoth” and have anything useful. the debate isn’t there. the content isn’t there. it’s not an agora with enough scale to matter. social media is dominated by a critical mass equation. nothing, nothing, nothing, then you get to a scale where “fission” and suddenly the energy is limitless.

but how do we achieve that? Building from scratch is incredibly difficult.

I think this is the best solution: change Twitter/X.

Open it up. Make it a protocol, not a company. Make it peer-to-peer, not centralized. Encrypt it all. Then let it go, so that no one has control over it anymore.

change the business model. Musk should move to:

• payments and a neo-banking system that can achieve what all the faltering cryptocurrencies and their stagnant “layer 2s” that are always 2 years away from “solving this problem in a flash” never could: anonymous, private, scalable trading, saving and investing. make it to the everything market with competing digital currencies and trusted counterparties where trading can take place behind firewalls.

• hardware. The world desperately needs a new smartphone that isn’t controlled by Google or Apple. Something secure and optimized for the coming peer-to-peer world. Something that isn’t 60% spyware. A phone you can trust. A phone that can be a trusted hub.

These two capabilities trump anything an ad-based or subscription-based Twitter could ever be. And it solves the layer one problem. The astonishing power of a network of satellite internet and billions of terrestrial telephone nodes, optimized to expand into one vast, ubiquitous network, could be transformative. It could finally put the ball out of Leviathan’s reach.

no “corporation” can stand against the state for long as the champion of free speech. They are too determined and they will keep coming, keep changing laws, keep making laws, keep arresting people, keep closing things down.

We have to go to places where they can’t follow us, where they can’t see us, and where they can’t matter.

This is the path. There is no other.

I said it in my first pile and I’ll say it again here:

It’s time to leave the house. It’s time for the internet to leave its awkward adolescence behind and live up to its promises.

It is time for information, conversation, agora, money and commerce to transcend the grasping tentacles of the dying giant we once mistook for government.

LG