On the Charging of Monsieur Durov

You have seen the announcement: the FSB, protector of the Russian public, has charged Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, with offenses touching terrorism itself. You have not yet looked for the encrypted message that will now travel by some other, less visible road, nor for the dissident in Moscow or Kazan who will think twice before typing a sentence he might have typed yesterday. Let us follow the reasoning a little further, and introduce the persons who have been left out of the account.

I take no position on whether Telegram has been used by criminals. Of course it has. So has the telephone, so has the postal service, so has every means by which men have ever communicated a thought they wished a third party not to intercept. The interesting question is never whether a tool can be misused - every tool can be misused, this is what makes it a tool and not a decoration - but what happens when the state, having discovered this misuse, seizes the tool by the throat and calls the seizure justice.

The seen, then, is a triumphant one: a dangerous man, or a man alleged to be dangerous, brought before the machinery of Russian law. The FSB has told the public that Telegram’s channels have carried instructions for sabotage and murder, and the public, reading only this sentence, applauds. But notice what the applause conceals. It conceals the fact that a platform used by many millions of ordinary Russians - for commerce, for family news, for the coordination of ordinary life, for the occasional grumble against a local official - has just been placed under a cloud that will not lift when the trial ends, if a trial occurs at all. The seen is the arrest of one man. The unseen is the recalculation, occurring at this moment in the minds of every other user, of how much honesty he can afford.

Follow the money, or in this case follow the incentive, a little further still. A regime that wishes to reduce sabotage has available to it many instruments: better policing of specific plots, cooperation on specific threats, the patient unglamorous work of investigation. It has chosen instead the broadest instrument available - the discrediting of an entire communications platform through the person of its founder. Why choose the broad instrument over the narrow one? Because the broad instrument does double duty. It catches, perhaps, some saboteurs. It also teaches a lesson to every journalist, every organizer, every citizen who was using that platform for something the state finds merely inconvenient rather than criminal. The terrorism charge is the seen. The chilling of ordinary speech is the unseen, and it is not an accident of the policy; it is very often the actual point of the policy, dressed in the vocabulary of security because no government has ever announced “we are narrowing the space in which you may speak freely” and been applauded for it.

Consider the shopkeeper in Yekaterinburg who has for years used Telegram to warn his customers of a police inspection likely to close his stall on some pretext. He has done nothing that any honest observer would call terrorism. He will, however, now delete the channel, or speak more carefully within it, or abandon it altogether - not because he fears prosecution for sabotage, which he has never contemplated, but because the category “Telegram user” has been rendered suspect by association, and suspicion is a tax that falls on the innocent and the guilty in equal measure, though only one of them deserves it.

I do not ask you to conclude that the FSB’s specific allegations are false; I have not the evidence to judge them, and neither, I suspect, has the public that is asked to applaud. I ask only that when a government announces it has struck a blow against sabotage and murder, you inquire what else was standing in the path of that blow. The seen is a case file. The unseen is a silence spreading quietly across a country, one deleted message at a time, and no headline will ever report its accumulation.