Pavel Durov: evaluation

Transcript context

…And the first time you’re referring to would that have to do with the complexity that was happening with the pressure from the government on VK? The increasing pressure and you had to figure out what to do, and you understood that you’re losing control of VK that moment. The first of these instances was in December 2011. December 2011 you had this huge protest on the streets of Moscow. They didn’t trust in the integrity of the election results to the state Duma in Russia. I remember 2011, I still lived in Russia running VK. There was no Telegram. So the government demanded that we take down the opposition groups of Navalny from VK that had hundreds of thousands of members and that were used to organize this protest. And I very publicly refused to do that. I just decided it’s not the right thing to do. People have the right to assemble. And I mocked the Prosecutor who handed me that demand. They put out a scan of it. And next to it a photo of a dog in a hoodie with its tongue out. And I said … This is my official response to the prosecutor’s request to ban the opposition groups. That was very funny at the moment. But then I had armed policemen trying to get into my apartment, and I thought about many things at that moment. I asked myself, did I make the right choice? And I came to the conclusion that I made the right choice and I asked myself, what would be the next thing that would logically follow from this? And I realized they’re probably going to put me in prison, so what am I going to do about it? I asked myself. And I told myself, I’m going to starve myself to death. It’s something that probably many men have. They’re ready to die for other people or certain principles they strongly believe in. I’m not alone here. I guess Edward Snowden was ready to die as well, or some other people like Assange. Also, at that moment, I realized there’s no way to communicate securely. I need to tell my brother what’s going on. They’re probably going after him. How do I tell him without betraying him? Because in 2011, remember WhatsApp was already there. I think they launched in 2009, but it had zero encryption. All messages were plain text in transit, meaning that even your system administrator, let alone your carrier had access to your messages it was only after Telegram started this push for encryption that this other apps suddenly remembered that privacy wasn’t their DNA as WhatsApp founders famously stated, but it must have been a dormant gene in 2011. Yeah. Yeah.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.