Telegram’s Durov: US tech firms face pressure from special services

MOSCOW, Sep 11 (PRIME) -- Messenger Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov has said that U.S.-domiciled technological companies may be strongly suppressed by local special services, according to a statement on Durov’s Telegram channel, seen by PRIME on Monday.

Durov gives a link to the full story on how U.S. agencies tried to infiltrate Telegram in 2016 and “it tells how the FBI tried to influence me and bribe our engineer in May 2016 to make Telegram less secure.”

“Luckily, since neither of us are U.S. citizens, we could afford to refuse their offers and I was able to tell the public about these attempts. If we were American citizens, the FBI would have likely tried to silence us using a legal procedure called a ‘gag order’, when the U.S. authorities can not only demand that you do something, like plant a backdoor into your app, but also prohibit you from telling the public about it, otherwise you can end up in jail.

“That whole story made me ask myself this question: if our team experienced such pressure during just one week’s trip to America, what kind of pressure are U.S.-based tech companies facing every day? How can a privacy oriented company permanently operate from America? We can hope that the open U.S. legal system would defend them, but due to the secrecy of these ‘gag orders’ we would never even know if things went wrong. And unfortunately, Edward Snowden’s revelations confirm some of the worst fears.”

Durov also suspects that some of the famous and most vocal U.S.-based influencers within the cryptography world are sponsored by the U.S. government to push the agenda of its agencies.

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