Pavel Durov

He posted this just now on Telegram, the site he created after his earlier creation VK.com was taken away from him by Russia.

I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating.

Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers.

What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control.

Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU).

Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy.

A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away.

We’ve been fed a lie.

We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech.

By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological.

So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. We are running out of time.

He said that in the run-up to the presidential elections in Romania Nicolas Lerner, the head of France’s foreign intelligence service (DGSE), asked him to suppress conservative Romanian voices on Telegram and that he rejected the request. 

He was arrested a year ago in Paris and held for months charged with allowing Telegram to after being accused of failing properly to moderate his app to reduce criminality. He was forced to allow police to have information on users in certain cases and make other concessions. One suspects that one reason the French acted as they did was to have access to information on Russians. 

He said recently that an attempt was made to poison him in 201. He did not give details but that might have been the Russians.