The investigation into Telegram boss Pavel Durov, who has warned global technology giants, was launched by a small cybercrime unit within the Paris prosecutor’s office, headed by 38-year-old Johanna Brousse.
The arrest of Durov, 39, last Saturday marks a significant shift in how some global authorities will deal with tech majors reluctant to monitor illegal content on their platforms.
Lawyers say the arrest is a sign of the tenacity of the J3 cybercrime unit, but the real test of its ambitions will be whether Brousse can get a conviction based on a largely untested legal argument.
In an unprecedented move against a major tech CEO, prosecutors argued that Durov is responsible for alleged illegalities on his platform, placing him under formal investigation on organized crime charges. He is suspected of complicity in running an online platform that allows the posting of child sexual abuse images, drug trafficking and fraud.
Durov’s lawyer said on Thursday that blaming him was “absurd” and that the app complies with European laws, reiterating an earlier statement by Telegram.
Being placed under formal investigation in France does not mean you are guilty or necessarily that you will be prosecuted, but it means that judges feel there is enough evidence to pursue an investigation. Investigations can last several years before they can be sent to trial or dismissed. Durov is out on bail, but he is barred from leaving France.
Paris prosecutor Laure Becquet said on Wednesday that Bruce’s unit launched an investigation into Durov earlier this year after it noticed his app was being used for a myriad of alleged crimes and had become frustrated by “the lack of response from Telegram to judicial requests.”
Brousse declined to comment.
In an interview with the newspaper Libération in January, Bruce said his office was monitoring a growing number of investigations involving Telegram and rival messaging app Discord, and said tackling crime on them was “one of my battles.”
Discord CEO Jason Citron did not respond to a request for comment.
Bruce’s J3 cybercrime unit is France’s most important, licensed to prosecute crimes across the country. But it’s also small, with just five prosecutors, far fewer than Switzerland’s 55-60 cybercrime prosecutors, a 2022 parliamentary report found. With limited resources, they “prioritize the most serious crimes,” Bruce told Le Figaro last year.
Bruce said in a 2022 podcast that she wanted to be tough “so that cybercriminals feel confident that if they attack France, they will be punished very severely”.
“We want people to be prosecuted, either in their country… or in France through an arrest warrant,” he said.
He said his office deals with “extremely sensitive matters.” “Sometimes legal and geopolitical issues become intertwined.”
Patrick Perrot, who coordinates AI-assisted investigations in the French gendarmerie and advises the Interior Ministry’s cyber command unit, said the J3 had taken an innovative approach to prosecuting such cases, setting an international precedent.
“I think this shows that you can’t just do whatever you want with these platforms,” he told Reuters. “This is a real question for the future, because the number of these platforms will not stop growing, so the challenge of regulation is necessary.”
Tough legal ground?
Brousse has been leading the J3 since 2020, which has given her the opportunity to oversee one of the most important – and controversial – French cybercrime cases to date.
In late 2020, the J3 took over the investigation into Sky ECC, which, along with EncroChat, was one of the main encrypted communication services used by gangsters to buy drugs and weapons or assassinate rivals. A few years earlier, French, Dutch and Belgian police had hacked their servers, which were located in northern France, giving French prosecutors jurisdiction over several resulting investigations.
According to Europol, more than 6,500 arrests have been made since EncroChat was taken down in 2020, and the legality of the intercepts has been challenged in appeals courts across Europe.
Canadian EncroChat owner Paul Kruski was extradited from the Dominican Republic to France in February, where he is now on trial. Lawyers for Sky ECC’s Jean-François Eppe are contesting his French arrest warrant.
EAP’s lawyer, Stephen Bonifaci, said his client was innocent, and that “Sky ECC was not conceived as a tool for criminals, nor was it commercialised as such.”
Kruski’s attorney, Antoine Way, said his client is innocent.
“The service founded by Paul Kruczyk, like other services that have enjoyed global success, was intended solely to protect the privacy and freedom of expression of its users, and was in no way intended to support criminal activities,” Way said in a statement.
Two other French lawyers who worked on the Sky ECC and EncroChat cases told Reuters these preliminary investigations gave prosecutors the ambitions — and a blueprint — to target Durov.
Robin Binsard, who has fought EncroChat’s cases in France’s top court, said prosecutors would have to prove that Durov knew of and approved of the crimes on the app. He called their argument “completely dubious.”
He added that the fact that Telegram did not comply with law enforcement requests “does not automatically make someone a participant in a criminal project.”
Binsard said it was clear that “France is cracking down on encrypted messaging providers”, and that other operators of such apps, such as Signal, “should worry about whether they are complying with French rules. Because the message is clear that if they don’t, there will be legal action”.
Signal did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A source at the Paris prosecutor’s office said the Sky ECC investigation had no connection to the Telegram probe.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)