Pavel Durov was arrested on Friday, 24 August, by French authorities. You can read more about him, here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Durov
Broadly, he is being arrested by government agencies seeking to de-privatise ( surveil ) communications between parties on Telegram, one of his technology projects.
My own thoughts on this, below.
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Heavy sigh. I don't have a preference between legality/illegality of nation-state-supervision over citizen communications.
I would say, for practical reasons, the legality never matters. Whether something is legal, or illegal, the individual will always be incentivised to make private decisions about whether to do it or not to do it. It is a matter of jungle law - might makes right, so nation states can make any laws they want, and individuals will always work around those.
For example, if it becomes well known that the Post Office opens and reads every envelope that passes through the Post Office, then anyone who wishes to keep secrets will simply establish a private network which bypasses the Post Office. This economic fact undergirds all discussion about how much of any public infrastructure ( a Commons ) is made available to activities deemed unwanted by those paying for the Commons. It is precisely the same sort of argument about how many cars to let on the roads, and whether their locations are being tracked by the police at all times, or not.
Related : the only purpose of cryptocurrency technology is to hedge ( derisk ) the control that nation states have over currencies. It's fundamentally governance de-centralisation technology. It is only logical for governments which prefer central control, to oppose this.
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