{"id":293728,"date":"2024-08-26T06:05:33","date_gmt":"2024-08-26T06:05:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=293728"},"modified":"2024-08-27T06:01:40","modified_gmt":"2024-08-27T06:01:40","slug":"censorship-suppression-of-free-speech-at-heart-of-telegram-crackdown-ex-cia-analyst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=293728","title":{"rendered":"Censorship, Suppression of Free Speech at Heart of Telegram Crackdown \u2013 Ex-CIA Analyst"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Miles \u2013 Sputnik Aug 24, 2024<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The West is looking to shut down criticism of its foreign policy in Ukraine and Gaza, according to one former CIA analyst.<\/p>\n

Opposition to the Telegram encrypted messaging platform is driven by the West\u2019s desire to surveil online activity and suppress criticism of its foreign policy,<\/strong> according to ex-CIA analyst Larry Johnson.<\/p>\n

The analyst made the claim during an interview with Sputnik after news broke that Telegram founder Pavel Durov had been arrested by French authorities after his private jet landed at an airport outside Paris.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the charges are all implausible, false,\u201d said the co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. \u201cThey’re charging him reportedly with terrorism. And with fraud. So this clearly smacks of a trumped up political case.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey’re going to charge him with terrorism because he has refused to censor certain groups, people that support Hamas are allowed to communicate freely on Telegram. Telegram is one of the few channels that actually allows information that’s critical of Western policy to go on.<\/strong> I think that’s really at the root of this.\u201d<\/p>\n

Durov reportedly faces a number of charges relating to Telegram\u2019s lack of moderation, which authorities claim implicates him in the sharing of content related to terrorism, drug trafficking, fraud, and money laundering.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The platform has become known as a home for political dissidents in the West, who are able to publish content that is discouraged or disallowed on other online platforms.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a time when [Durov] was considered friendly with [French President Emmanuel] Macron,\u201d Johnson recalled. \u201cBut that’s clearly come and gone because this kind of arrest would not have happened without Macron’s knowledge and approval.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s possible that he’s being turned into a bargaining chip. But the question is, who’s going to bargain for him? He walked away from Russia,\u201d he noted, recalling that the tech entrepreneur left the country in 2014. \u201cThe fact of the matter is he left Russia and accepted French citizenship, and has chosen to reside in the [United] Arab Emirates. So he’s not high on the priority list of Russian intelligence to get him back by any stretch. He’s of no use to Russia in that regard.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the Westerners \u2013 the French in particular \u2013 have made a mistake in grabbing him because they think that this is going to somehow create leverage or create an issue with Russia.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previously Durov claimed during an interview with journalist Tucker Carlson that the FBI had attempted to encourage one of Telegram\u2019s engineers to create a backdoor in the application for the use of Western intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

Johnson claimed that criticism of the US-backed proxy war in Ukraine and Israel\u2019s military operation in Gaza on Telegram particularly chafed Western authorities. The social media app TikTok was similarly attacked by US legislators earlier this year when legislation was passed to ban the app after this fall\u2019s presidential election.<\/p>\n

The pro-Israel lobby has been implicated in the passage of the bill, with Anti-Defamation League executive Jonathan Greenblatt lamenting the popularity of pro-Palestine content on the platform. Zionist settlers have sought to colonize Palestine and displace its indigenous population since the founding of Israel in 1948.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the major issue with respect to the West is the coverage that [Telegram] provides about what’s going on in Ukraine and the coverage he allows with respect to the Israeli genocide against Palestinians in the Middle East and in Gaza and the West Bank,\u201d Johnson claimed. \u201cI think particularly the last issue has rankled the Israelis quite a bit. And they’ve been looking to shut him down. The French reportedly have been looking to shut Telegram down. So we’ll see.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEven if you’re a Russian billionaire you\u2019ve got a big, fat target on your back,\u201d he warned.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cThey’ve already gone after Dimitri Simes,\u201d Johnson noted. \u201cDimitri is an American who became a naturalized American [citizen] in the 1970s because he was a dissident against the Soviet Union, against the Communist Party. And now the very country that he fled to for freedom and protection has turned on him and has unleashed our version of the secret police on him.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it can happen to someone like Dimitri it can happen to anybody.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attempts to silence any criticism of Western foreign policy in Gaza and Ukraine is the real reason for the clampdown on the Telegram encrypted messaging platform, says Larry Johnson<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":293731,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-293728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-controlling-the-news-andor-the-free-exchange-of-ideas-and-information"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=293728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":293729,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293728\/revisions\/293729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/293731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=293728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=293728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=293728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}