Durov appears to be an old-school cyber-libertarian who believes in privacy and encryption. His arrest will certainly resonate in America, which has seen a similar debate over how much online services should cooperate with law enforcement. The FBI, for instance, has occasionally warned that end-to-end encryption will result in a "going dark" problem in which crime simply disappears from their view, and the US has seen repeated attempts to legislate backdoors into encryption systems. Those have all been defeated, however, and civil liberties advocates and techies generally note that creating backdoors makes such systems fundamentally insecure. The global debate over crime, encryption, civil liberties, and messaging apps is sure to heat up with Durov's arrest.
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