​Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, said thanks to AI-enabled public surveillance, “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Matthew Guariglia and Lisa Femia of the Electronic Frontier Foundation push back on the common sentiment from surveillance advocates that you are wrong to have an expectation of privacy when you go about in public.
 
“Today’s technology can effortlessly track your location over time, collect sensitive intimate information about you, keep a retrospective record of this data that may be stored for months, years, or indefinitely. This data can be collected for any purpose, or even for none at all. And taken in the aggregate, this data can paint a detailed picture of your daily life – a picture that is more cheaply and easily accessed by the government than ever before.
 
“Because of this, we’re at risk of exposing more information about ourselves in public than we were in decades past. This, in turn, affects how we think about privacy in public. While your expectation of privacy is certainly different in public than it would be in your private home, there is no legal rule that says you lose all expectation of privacy whenever you’re in a public place.”
 
In fact, EFF notes that the 2018 landmark Supreme Court opinion in Carpenter v. United States, the Court wished to preserve “the degree of privacy against government that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.”

Neil C. Hughes has a compelling piece in cybernews.com describing an Orwellian reality that, unfortunately, is not a matter of science-fiction. It is already part of our daily lives. Hughes writes:
 
“The constant tracking from our devices, websites, social media platforms, CCTV, and even your employer might be leaving you feeling like you are trapped inside a personalized version of The Truman Show.”
 
At home, images and data from digital assistants, Ring Doorbell surveillance partnered with police departments, smart appliances, heart rate monitors, and even washing machines produce information that “could be used against you by digital forensics teams should you find yourself accused of a crime.”
 
At work, you are tracked by productivity tools, and on the streets by cameras and facial recognition. Banks monitor our “every transaction to monitor for fraud or money laundering.”
 
Hughes adds:
 
“After you finally return home and collapse in your favorite chair to unwind, you are not necessarily paranoid if you question whether you’re watching your TV or if it’s watching you. Some new smart TVs have cameras typically hidden in a bezel at the top of the TV screen, leaving many to think there is nowhere to hide from the watchful eye of cameras and algorithms.”

​For days after the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov by French authorities at Le Bourget Airport near Paris, the world civil liberties community held back.
 
The impulse to rush to the defense of a Russian dissident/entrepreneur was almost overwhelming. Durov had refined his skills with the creation of VK, a social media website that allowed dissidents, opposition politicians, and Ukrainian protesters to evade Vladimir Putin’s emerging surveillance state as late as 2014. After Durov fled Russia with his brother Nikolai, they created the encrypted messenger service Telegram, which allows users not only to communicate in secrecy, but to also set their messages to disappear.
 
Across Asia, Africa, Latin America, and our own country, Telegram enables dissidents, journalists, and people in fear of cartels or abusive spouses to communicate without making themselves vulnerable. So civil libertarians were naturally poised to rush to Durov’s defense. But they didn’t. There was the matter of the 12 charges approved by a French judge this week, including “complicity” in crimes such as aiding in the distribution of international narcotics and child sex abuse material.
 
The many devils in this case lurk in its many details, some of which are far from well understood. At this point, however, we can at least pose preliminary questions. Some answers must come from the French government. Some must come from every person who cares about privacy, including the almost 1 billion users of Telegram.

1. Telegram has a service that offers unencrypted, custom chat rooms and one-way broadcast channels that can accommodate up to 200,000 users. Was it in these semi-public channels that the French government alleges the criminal conduct took place?
   
   
2. Did Durov and his people monitor these large chat rooms and channels? If they did not, perhaps out of a matter of principle, does that exculpate them to any degree?  
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3. The value of an encrypted messaging service is its security. The provision of a backdoor by Telegram to any government would necessarily result in the compromise of Telegram’s value to some of the most endangered and vulnerable people in the world. But the flip side of this is that with an encrypted service there may be no way for even Durov himself to know the content of the messages crossing his servers. Should such hands-off, deliberate ignorance absolve Durov & Co. from criminal liability?

 
We can already highlight at least one aspect of this case that should concern civil libertarians and free speech advocates around the world. Thanks to an insightful analysis by Kevin Collier and Rob Wile in Slate, we know that two of the 12 charges involve a purported obligation of providers of cryptological services to require their users to register with their real identities. Another count declares it a crime to import such an encrypted service “without prior declaration.”
 
Collier and Wile write that this latter provision, which at first sounds like a matter of bureaucratic form-filling, actually implies that “France sees the use of internationally based, unregulated ‘encryption’ service as a crime all its own.” If so, will France get away with criminalizing private encryption services? And if that happens, might this become EU policy?
 
We are already seeing Europe employ illiberal interpretations of the recently enacted Digital Services Act. The EU’s top digital regulator, Thierry Breton, threatened X with legal action if it ran Elon Musk’s full interview with Donald Trump. While Breton’s threat was later disowned by his boss, EU President Ursula von der Leyen, it was still breathtaking to see in Europe today that a powerful regulator believes the European public would be well served by censoring the words of a major party nominee to lead the United States. It is not a stretch to imagine such people also wanting to stamp out private communications. Is France now using possibly legitimate charges about Telegram’s operation to undermine the very idea of encryption?
 
Everyone who cares about privacy should watch how this case unfolds. After all, thanks to Telegram, we know that there are at least one billion of us.

​Nafees Syed and Kamel El Hilali, fellows at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, wrote in CNN.com.
 
“The Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (RISAA) passed by Congress last month did anything but reform a system that subjects Americans to unconstitutional government surveillance …
 
“While the law includes exemptions for some public facilities, such as restaurants and community centers, the number of businesses and entities that offer a Wi-Fi connection means that intelligence agencies may compel places such as airports, train stations, transport companies (trains, subways, buses) and shopping malls to convey their customers’ communications data to intelligence agencies upon presentation of a directive requiring them to cooperate.
 
“This provision transforms a law intended to target non-US persons abroad into a domestic surveillance tool.”