Freedom of speech under pressure in a corporatised landscape

The charges against Pavel Durov, founder of messaging app Telegram, send a chilling signal about freedom of speech.

On 21 October 2013 the US ambassador to France, Charles Rivkin, was summoned urgently to the French foreign ministry in Paris. That same day Le Monde published excerpts of revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden showing that across 30 days, the US National Security Agency (NSA) had intercepted ‘70.3 million recordings of French citizens’ telephone data’ revealing surveillance on a ‘massive scale’.

Then French prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault demanded clear answers and insisted the United States work with France in ‘creating the conditions of transparency so these practices can be put to an end’. John Kerry, secretary of state at the time, happened to be in Paris when the Le Monde story broke. Ahead of meeting him, foreign minister Laurent Fabius said angrily that surveillance was ‘totally unacceptable’ and ‘we have to make sure, very quickly, that this no longer happens.’ On 1 November Kerry admitted US spying had ‘reached too far’.

All this happened a decade or so before France’s arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov on 24 August. Then, European leaders consistently affected outrage at Washington’s surveillance regime, which took on enormous dimensions under the direction of former US vice-president Dick Cheney. After 9/11, many in the US government decided it could no longer afford to protect the right to privacy and those of us in the US who remained committed to those ideals – political liberals usually – were thrilled whenever Europe tried to shame us back to our senses.

When German chancellor Angela Merkel found out Barack Obama’s administration had directly targeted her phone in 2013, she declared that ‘spying on friends is not acceptable’. Two years later, in 2015, when WikiLeaks released a report called ‘Espionnage Élysée’ showing the US government spied on three different French presidents. we again cheered French outrage.

Many of us in the US thought it was a good thing that Barack Obama was forced to place a second apology call to (...)

Full article: 1 616 words.

Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi is a journalist.

François Flahault is a senior researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris, and author of Crépuscule de Prométhée (Twilight of Prometheus), Mille et Une Nuits, Paris, 2008, from which this article is extracted

(1) Allen Lane, New York, 2007, p 323.

(3) Neo-paganism preaches the cult of strength, of the leader and of race.

(4) From “Objectivist Ethics”, reproduced in The Virtue of Selfishness, Signet, 1964.

(5) Ibid. “Collectivised ‘Rights”, 1963.

(6) Ibid. It’s not hard to divine what Rand’s view of the invasion of Iraq would have been.

(7) Ibid. Rand uses one of the commonest arguments employed in the 19th century by supporters of colonial expansionism.