Telegram Founder & CEO Arrested in France as Online Censorship Escalates; Interview: Congressman Warren Davidson (R-OH) Speaks Out Against Speech Crackdowns
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Telegram Founder Arrested in France (5:56)
Interview with Congressman Warren Davidson (R-OH) (39:17)
Outro (56:08)
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Good evening, it's Monday, August Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that appears every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
As you can probably see, I am not in our normal studio.
I'm traveling due to some reporting, but I think we can make do.
We should have a studio For the rest of the week, and we have, I think, an extremely important story to dissect and to analyze, and that is that the billionaire founder of the encrypted app Telegram was arrested over the weekend by the French National Police when his private jet landed in an airport just outside of Paris.
French authorities have now confirmed that he is in detention, and in detention specifically because the prosecutors have created a theory That the creator and founder and CEO of Telegram, which is intended to be an encrypted app designed to safeguard the privacy of its users, has become, quote, complicit, criminally complicit, as a result not of
Anything that the founders of Telegram are doing or that its executives are doing, but that other people unknown to Telegram, what they are doing on the platform, and that by failing to censor the platform, by failing to shut down channels of the demand of the French government, The owner and founder of Telegram has himself become criminally responsible.
This is a major escalation of the war against any sort of attempt to preserve internet freedom.
Now, if you stop and think about it, this has been a theory that has long been bubbling—the idea that if leaders or owners or managers or executives of various platforms don't censor information that the government instructs them to censor, that that becomes a criminal felony.
The only actual example of any previous social manager executive being actually arrested for failing to turn over information to or censor on behalf of the government was back in 2016 when Brazil arrested a Facebook official as a result of Facebook's refusal, which they said was due to their inability to turn over certain end to end encrypted content on WhatsApp.
But this latest Is a massive escalation of the attack on online free speech by trying now to consecrate the legal principle that any owner of a platform, the founder, the CEO, any of the top executives becomes criminally liable, complicit in criminal activity, whether it's.
Uh, proliferating hate speech or disinformation or trafficking and child pornography or anything else that the platform can be accused of as a result of not complying with government orders.
And this is clearly yet another attempt often led by Western Europe or Brazil or Canada with the United States trying to find a way to copy and follow.
And to get around the First Amendment.
And so we will analyze this entire case and its implications for online free speech.
And then we will speak to Congressman Warren Davidson, who is a Republican representing Ohio's 8th congressional district.
He has represented that seat since 2016.
And Congressman Davidson has used his place in Congress and his increasing seniority to make front and center the cause of online free speech.
One of his principal focal points, he was one of the few Republicans to denounce the ban on TikTok.
We'll talk to him about the Durov incident and arrest, the ban on TikTok.
But we'll also talk to him about the still increasing dangers of the war in Ukraine, not only with the incursion of Ukrainian troops back with U.S.
weapons into Russian soil where they continue to remain dug in, trying to occupy parts of Russia with the permission of the United States and the weapons that we're providing, but also the collapsing front line in Ukraine where Russia continues to make broader incursions to the West.
We'll talk to him about what the U.S.
Endgame is, whether we're just going to continue to fund this futile but still very dangerous war to the end.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, so probably some of you have heard the news over the weekend that the French government has detained under what were at first very unknown circumstances so probably some of you have heard the news over the weekend that the French government has detained under what were at first very unknown circumstances the billionaire founder
and Russian national, Pavel Derov, as a result of what clearly appeared to be the French government's anger, that Telegram often ignores censorship orders that emanate from various governments.
And as a result, Derov has paid himself An enemy of many powerful governments around the world.
In fact, when Durov, who is Russian born and is a Russian citizen, first began to think about how to found social media platforms, he founded what was known as Russian Facebook.
And it became a massively popular social media platform in Russia.
They became very wealthy as a result of founding that.
And when the Russian government began demanding that that platform Turn over information about citizens, especially citizens who are using that app and that social media platform in order to try and stir unrest in Ukraine and trying to foster regime change in Ukraine to make that government that was elected less pro-Russian and more pro-Europe as the Rebels in Ukraine, backed by the West, ended up being able to do.
Telegram refused, and they basically had to flee Russia as a result.
And then it was thereafter, in fact, once the Snowden reporting began, just a few months later, when they founded, these brothers, the Dura brothers, founded this second app, which is Telegram, that was designed based on the promise to have Very sophisticated encryption that makes it very, very difficult for governments around the world to be able to spy on or shut down or trace who it is that's communicating online.
And obviously, this has become a very important ability in places like India or China or Russia or all sorts of places where all kinds of censorship can take place, but it's also increasingly important to citizens of Western Europe and to the United States.
And so there is nothing, basically nothing, that governments feel threatened by and hate more than executives of social media platforms who permit free speech on the internet, as we've been reporting on probably more than anything else.
The attempt to shut down online free speech, in my view, is the single greatest goal of Europe, the EU, the UK, of Canada, of countries around the democratic world, and of course, the United States as well.
And that was why it was so predictable that soon as Elon Musk bought Twitter based on the promise that he hasn't always completely fulfilled, but certainly has taken major steps toward fulfilling to turn that into a free speech platform that the attacks on Elon Musk from every single conceivable direction would begin exploding.
And that's exactly what happened.
Attacks on his character, legal attacks on his various companies, all sorts of investigations, and now a formal criminal investigation by the EU based on claims that he is permitting too much disinformation to disseminate online.
So you can see that attack on You can certainly see it on this platform where France has basically already made it impossible for Rumble to have access to its market by demanding that Rumble remove Russian state media outlets like RT and Sputnik.
And Rumble's position is, we're not going to take orders from the French government about who's allowed on our site and who isn't.
And so the French said, we're going to make you unavailable at the IP level.
And if you are in France and you try and watch Rumble, like if you try and watch it in Brazil, As a result of members' refusal to deal with those censorship orders, they're just not available in those countries.
It shows how intense and how angry and how serious governments around the world are taking the threat that they see from unfettered free speech because they saw what happened in 2016 when Americans defied elite decrees and elected Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton.
They saw it when the British ratified Brexit instead of doing what they're told and staying in the EU.
They've seen it with the rise of populist parties all over the democratic world, and this frightens pro-establishment sectors, and they're trying to kill the main weapon That's being used against establishment power, which is a free Internet.
People like Pavel Durov, who would enable the Internet and sectors of the Internet to remain free, have become public enemy number one.
Now, earlier today, the prosecutor of the French Republic issued a document that made quite clear Exactly what the theories are behind Pavel Durov's arrest.
It was speculated over the weekend that it was because of French anger at his refusal and Telegram's refusal to turn over user information into censor on command, and basically the French prosecutor with this document confirmed that today.
We're going to put it on the screen, and I think it's very important to note here that this document doesn't explicitly say that it's about Pavel Dura, but it's very obvious that this is what this this is who the document is referring to and they're essentially saying we detained this foreign national and here's the reasons why here are the crimes that we suspect him of having committed.
If we put that on the screen, you can essentially see that the document says that the judicial investigation Actually, it does say, Pavel Dorov, founder and CEO of the instant messaging and platform Telegram, was arrested at Le Bourget Airport in the outskirts of Paris on Saturday, the 24th of August 2024, and taken into police custody at 8pm.
This measure comes in the context of a judicial investigation opened on the 8th of July 2024, following a preliminary inquiry Initiated by Section J3, which is a organ of the French government designed to fight against cybercrime at the Paris Prosecutor's Office.
And the judicial investigation was opened, according to this document, on charges of, and there you see, seven or eight different crimes that begin with the word complicity.
Things like complicity with web mastering on an online platform in order to enable legal transactions in order to organize group complicity and possessing pornographic images of minors, distributing, offering, or making available pornographic images, requiring, transporting, possessing, offering, or selling of narcotic substances.
Complicity in offering, selling, or making available equipment, tools, programs, or data designed to be adapted to get access and to damage the operations of an automated data processing system, organized fraud.
But when you sort of put down the legalisms, the theory of this criminal prosecution is that not just the company itself, but the executives of the company can become criminally liable, put in prison, Not as a result of anything they're accused of doing.
They're not accused of engaging in any of those crimes of possessing child pornography or enabling the transport or sale of unauthorized technology.
They're accused of simply providing a service where people can speak freely and privately and of not acting on the demands of the government and therefore They're threatening to where they have already put this Russian born billionaire into prison for the crime of offering a free speech platform, creating legal theories where executives of these companies can be criminally prosecuted.
You could very easily see that happening to the CEO of Rumble, who also continues to refuse to obey censorship orders from various governments and courts that are deemed unjust by them, as well as Elon Musk, who, as I said, is in the target is now the target of Multiple investigations around the world.
In fact, he is already the subject of a criminal investigation in Brazil as a result of that Supreme Court justice that Elon Musk has been attacking and denouncing.
Alexandre de Moraes, who we've reported on many times, who has become incredibly tyrannical, and he has now included Axe and Elon Musk as a target of a criminal investigation.
So you can see this menacing attempt, this increasingly threatening attempt, to threaten not the companies but the executives of the company with criminal prosecution and prison if they continue to provide any sort of platform that allows free speech and anonymity of conduct and speech online.
And I don't think it takes much to illustrate why that's so dangerous.
The danger that this illustrates can be seen in part by people who are celebrating what it means and how it might be used.
So here is Alexander Vindman, who gained a certain sort of fame or notoriety during the first Trump impeachment hearing when he depicted himself as some sort of brave whistleblower against Donald Trump.
And he has now become a hardcore fanatical advocate of establishment dogma, the war in Ukraine.
He's obsessed with that.
And he basically is just a kind of a standard liberal.
And much of what he says, though more fanatical, illustrates the underlying mindset.
And here's what he said in celebrating the arrest of Pavel Jurev today.
Quote, "While Durov holds French citizenship, he is arrested for violating French law.
This has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter.
There's a growing intolerance for platform disinformation and malign influence and a growing appetite for accountability.
Musk should be nervous.
So he is interpreting that and celebrating that as exactly what it is, which is an obvious, very clear threat to social media companies around the world, to the billionaires who found them, to the people who run them, that if you want to have free movement on planet Earth, if you want to be able to live freely, you have two choices.
You can start taking censorship orders from governments and turning over whatever user data they want about your users so they can find who it is who's saying whatever people are saying online.
Or you will face prosecution around the world, not just in tiny little countries, but in major countries like France.
Obviously, Pavel Durov assumed he would be safe traveling to a Western European country, and he found out when he got there that that was obviously untrue.
Now, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, responded to a lot of different denunciations of this incident, including by Elon Musk and others.
By issuing this statement earlier today, he said, quote, I have seen false information regarding France following the arrest of Pavel Durov.
France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation and to the spirit of entrepreneurship, and it will remain so.
In a state governed by the rule of law, Freedoms are upheld within a legal framework, both on social media and in real life, to protect citizens and respect their fundamental rights.
It is up to the judiciary and its full independence to enforce the law.
The arrest of the president of Telegram on French soil took place as part of an ongoing judicial investigation.
It is no way a political decision.
It is up to the judges to rule on the matter.
Now, this all sounds very familiar to me because every single time The Brazilian Supreme Court does something authoritarian every time it imprisons somebody for criticizing the court.
And the theory is created that they're somehow undermining Brazilian democracy by criticizing or questioning particular judges or policies of the Brazilian government.
Every time somebody is banned off the Internet by order of a judge, this is what the Brazilian government says.
Oh, we're a country of laws.
And when judges issue these rulings, that's for the judiciary to act independently.
And we're just going to honor those rulings and enforce them.
We're not going to question them.
And what that means is that as long as you have a judiciary filled with people who also agree that Internet freedom is an extremely dangerous threat to establishment order, to the ruling class, which it is.
In fact, I would argue it's by far the greatest threat, a free Internet.
It's why Edward Snowden unraveled his life and risked his freedom in order to defend it.
It's why Julian Assange did the same thing.
That's why it has become the primary cause of my work as well.
It's because the Internet is the single most powerful tool that human beings have.
In fact, the only real powerful tool that human beings have to communicate freely with one another, to organize freely, to act in privacy, with privacy, or in some semblance of whatever remains of privacy online.
And once that's gone, That's the only remaining source of speech in the flow of information that establishment sectors don't fully control yet.
They're trying to fully control it.
They're close to fully controlling it, but they don't control it fully yet because of the pockets of free speech that continue to exist on the Internet.
And the people who are responsible for those pockets of free speech have become public enemy number one.
Of these governments for exactly that reason, because their goal is to put a stranglehold on the Internet so that the only things you can say on the Internet and do on the Internet are things that aggrandize the interest of state leaders.
And so, of course, Emmanuel Macron is going to say, oh, this isn't political.
This is just a standard crime.
We have laws, not just in real life, but also online, and people aren't allowed to commit crimes online.
But nobody is saying that the founder of Telegram committed crimes himself.
What they're saying is that he permitted the other people to commit crimes because his platform is a free one.
It would be like if tomorrow the FBI went and arrested the CEO and top shareholders of AT&T and when people said, well, why?
Have you arrested the CEO and the top shareholders of AT&T?
And the argument was, well, because a judge issued an arrest warrant, because people have been committing crimes, planning crimes on the telephone, and AT&T has allowed them to continue to do so freely.
They haven't listened on the calls.
They haven't shut down those calls.
They could then be theoretically complicit in all these crimes based on the theory that the French government is now trying to implement.
This is what makes this so dangerous.
And the fact that Emmanuel Macron is saying, oh, these are just judges doing it.
These judges are so often in cahoots with.
I mean, who do you think appoints these judges?
Who do you think chooses them?
From what precincts of society are they emerging?
They're all guardians of establishment power, and of course they're going to use their judicial power just like they'll use their state power, their executive power, their legislative power, these states will, to shut down the internet and any remnants of free speech on it.
And that's exactly what happened.
And the fact that you're hiding behind a judge when doing so doesn't make it any less lawless or menacing.
Now, Here's the CEO of Rumble, Chris Pawlowski, who happened to be in France, in Europe, when the arrest was announced, when the report came of Pavel Durov being arrested immediately upon landing just outside that airport in Paris.
And Chris Pawlowski, the CEO of this platform, yesterday said, quote, I'm a little late to this, but for good reason.
I've just safely departed from Europe France has threatened Rumble, and now they have crossed a red line by arresting Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, reportedly for not censoring speech.
Rumble will not stand for this behavior, and we will use every legal means available to fight for freedom of expression, a universal human right.
We are currently fighting in the courts of France, and we hope for Pavel Durov's immediate release.
I find that sentence both shocking and unbelievable, but also completely reasonable.
Which is, I just safely departed from Europe.
Why would the CEO of a social media platform who has not broken the law feel like he couldn't speak out until he, quote, safely departed from Europe?
Think about the fear that has been instilled in so many people as a result of this authoritarian framework.
That so often is What the real impact and intent of these kinds of measures are not even necessarily to punish people or to imprison people online as a result of their attempts to speak freely.
But what it's designed to do is to send a message to citizens everywhere that, look, if we can arrest Pavel Durov, one of the richest men on the planet, And if we can make Elon Musk the target and the subject of a criminal investigation, if we're going to exclude entire platforms, social media platforms from all of these countries, think about what we can do to you if you try and remain private online and speak against our government.
One of the reasons why I've been talking about the reporting I've been doing in Brazil over the last two weeks that is aimed at this judge who has consolidated what I can only describe as tyrannical power, and I've talked about before how Amazing it is to watch, to live in a country that is democratic, that you've always considered free.
It's kind of slowly tilt into, you know, and it goes gradually.
So every time something gets normalized, people accept it, and then it gets a little bit more normalized.
Before you realize it, you're living in a country where a lot of people go to prison for speaking online against the government or speaking online against this judge.
People get banished off the internet with no trial.
None of this happens with a trial.
None of this happens with due process.
It's all done by the sweep and sign of a pen in secret with no justification and no evidence.
And there's no one to appeal to because it's being done by the Supreme Court.
And the reporting that we've done over the past two weeks, which is based on a massive archive from this judge's chambers, what he did on Thursday was opened a criminal inquiry Into how we did this reporting into who our sources were.
And obviously that is designed to say that if you even speak to a journalist, if you want to be a source to a journalist and report on anything that I'm doing, I will open a criminal investigation.
I will lead that criminal investigation.
So I, the judge, am the supposed victim of what he's calling fake news, which is a crime in Brazil, and he's the enforcer of it.
So imagine if you have the power to have any newspaper article about you just to create fake news.
Which is what every government official thinks of any negative reporting about them, and they always have.
It's just that ordinarily that used to be the right of a free press, and now it's considered a crime.
And during the course of this reporting, I have found so often so many people who are very concerned about and afraid of the powers of this judge, and yet are petrified of speaking out publicly against him for very good reason.
That is the climate of fear that oftentimes is even more repressive than the actual censorship itself.
It fosters self-censorship and conformity, because you know in sort of this visceral, instinctive way that that's the best way for you to stay safe.
And so watching Pavel Durov, Get put in handcuffs upon getting off his private jet for the crime of complicity and other people's crime for allowing free speech on the Internet is designed to say we are very, very serious about criminalizing the free flow of information online to the extent that we don't like that information.
We're going to call it disinformation.
We're going to call it hate speech.
And we're going to Not just accuse the people who are spreading that information of being criminals, but the people who permit it, who give them a platform to use it.
Edward Snowden, who, as I said, unraveled his entire life in order to defend the cause of a free Internet.
I mean, ultimately, that's what Snowden's cause was, even though the initial, most obvious cause was the defense of the right to privacy.
What it really was, was an attempt to prevent the Internet from becoming What the opposite of what it was supposed to be, this kind of place for free, liberated, egalitarian organization and exchange of ideas and information by people all over the world, and instead converting it into one of the most unprecedented tools of coercion and surveillance and censorship and propaganda ever known.
That was Edward Snowden's cause, not just the narrow issue of privacy, but the question of a free Internet.
And so he went, and remember Edward Snowden still faces life in prison.
If he left Russia, he would be immediately detained by the U.S.
government, put in a national security prison in the United States, charged with multiple felonies, even though much of what Snowden revealed was found by courts to have been illegal.
Not his disclosures, but the actions of the government officials that he permitted us to report on and to disclose.
But again, anybody who is a threat to the system, as they showed with Julian Assange, they're trying to show with Edward Snowden, is going to be somewhat treated very harshly.
So here's what he had to say yesterday.
Quote, the arrest of Pavel Durov is an assault on the basic human rights of speech and association.
I am surprised and deeply saddened that Macron has descended to the level of taking hostages as a means of gaining access to private communications.
It lowers not only France, but the world.
Now, one of the justifications that France is using for trying to stir public sentiment against Telegram and against Pavel Durov is by claiming that Telegram and Pavel Durov are not just facilitating free speech, but they're also facilitating things like the trading and sharing of child pornography and pornographic images of children and things of that nature.
And what I can tell you is, is that from the very first attempts to try and censor the Internet, to prevent the Internet from being free, back in the mid-90s, one of the very first attempts to censor the Internet was when there was a bombing at the Oklahoma City courthouse.
They eventually convicted Timothy McVeigh for it.
It was during the Clinton administration.
And the Clinton administration immediately exploited that crime to say, look, we have these far right militants in our country who are very dangerous and they're communicating with one another online.
They're radicalizing each other online.
So we need a backdoor to the internet.
To the encryption that is used on the internet because we can't allow the government to be excluded from conversations that people are having.
And they use the threat of terrorism to scare people into believing that the government needed that access.
They use the threat of child pornography as well, going all the way back to the very beginning.
One of the first controversies was in 1994 when the government wanted to install what was called a chipper, a clipper chip.
And here you see the New York Times in April of 1994.
The headline is, Of Privacy and Security, The Clipper Chip Debate.
And it reported this, quote, The Clinton administration's goal is to make it easier for law enforcement officials to conduct legal wiretaps on new generations of devices that send information over the telephone system, including wireless phones, computers, and facsimile machines.
The hearing before subcommittees of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology have been called to review the adoption of Clipper as a new encryption standard, a move that has been widely criticized on privacy grounds, and to explore modifications and alternatives.
It's the hope of the administration officials that Clipper will eventually become a standard part of telephones and other communication devices.
The administration noted in a statement in February announcing its endorsement of Clipper as the new encryption system, quote, unfortunately, the same encryption technology that can help Americans protect business secrets and personal privacy can also be used by terrorist drug dealers and other criminals.
Fear mongering has always been the way that governments erode people's liberties by saying that there are these terrible people doing these scary things, and unless you give us the power to spy and to take away your privacy and free speech, There's no way for us to protect you from that.
The FBI director during the Clinton years was Louis Freeh, and he appeared before the House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime in March of 1985, where he talked about The need for the FBI to be able to access the Internet and not be frozen out of people's conversations.
And he said, quote, even though access is all but assured and even more difficult problem with court authorized warrant wiretaps loom powerful encryption is becoming commonplace.
The drug cartels are buying sophisticated communications equipment.
Unless the issue of encryption is resolved soon, criminal conversations over the telephone and other communication devices will become indecipherable by law enforcement.
This, as much as any issue jeopardizes the public safety and national security of this country, drug cartels, terrorists, and kidnappers
Now, is it true that if you have a measure of privacy online, if you allow encryption, if you keep the government out of conversations, if you allow free speech online, that that might be abused and exploited by criminals doing bad things?
Of course that's possible.
That's true of every freedom.
We don't allow the government to barge into people's homes without a search warrant, without going to a court and convincing a court that there's probable cause to believe that the person inside has committed a crime or there's evidence of a crime inside the house, even though we know that that makes police work a lot more difficult.
Police would have a much easier time catching pedophiles and child pornographers and rapists, all kinds of bad people, if we got rid of the requirement That the police first get a warrant before entering our home.
They could just enter homes at random.
They probably catch a lot more criminals.
They enter your home, they don't have a search warrant, no proof.
They start looking at your computer, other people's computers, and they find things on there that they decide are criminal.
No warrant, no prior restraint.
Unfortunately for them, the Constitution requires that because security is not the only value.
It often conflicts with freedom and privacy.
And we make that balance all the time, but the government is constantly trying to get you to focus on pedophilia and child pornography and terrorism and drug trafficking as a way for you to say, oh, we cannot have any platforms that allow any degree of free speech or privacy.
Here is.
What the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the founder of it, John Perry Barlow, said back in October 1993.
J.P.
Barlow was one of the pioneers of Internet freedom, one of the main theorists of Internet freedom.
He was actually one of the people with whom I co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation, along with people like Lauren Poitras and Edward Snowden.
And a lot of privacy activists, including the actor John Cusack and others, Daniel Ellsberg as well, the Pentagon Papers leaker.
It was like one of the greatest honors of my work was to be able to work with Daniel Ellsberg, who was a childhood hero of mine.
And we formed the Freedom of the Press Foundation in order to defend Press freedoms online and the freedom of the free internet.
And they still, although I left the board a few years ago, they still do great work in that regard.
And J.P.
Barlow was sort of the visionary behind it.
He was on the board when we founded it.
He eventually passed away, I think, in 2019.
But he had devoted his life to the cause of internet freedom, going back to when the internet was still just a kind of advent of an idea just emerging.
And he understood, like several other people did, the pioneers of internet freedom.
That this Internet could be this extraordinary tool, unprecedented tool of liberation, but it could also be degraded into its opposite.
And this is what he said back in 1993, quote, a plain text on crypto policy.
He said, quote, for all the debate over the details, few on either side seem to be approaching the matter from first principles, where they enshrine threats, drug dealers, terrorists, child molesters and foreign enemies sufficiently and presently imperiling to justify fundamentally compromising all future transmitted privacy.
It seems to me that America's greatest health risks derive from the drugs that are illegal.
A position that statistics overwhelmingly support.
And then there's terrorism, to which we lost a total of two Americans in 1992, even with the World Trade Center bombing, only six in 1993.
Honestly can't imagine an organized ring of child molesters, but I suppose one or two might be out there.
But it's not Podesta or anyone else in the current White House who worries me.
Despite their claims to the contrary, I'm not convinced they like Clipper any better than I do.
It's the people I can't see who worry me.
These are the people who actually developed Clipper and its classified algorithm.
The people who, through expert controls, have kept American cryptography largely to themselves.
The people who are establishing in secret what the public can or cannot employ to protect its own secrets.
They are invisible and silent to all the citizens they purportedly serve, save those who sit on congressional intelligence committees.
In secret, they are making us, for us, what might be the most important choice that has ever faced American democracy.
That is whether our descendants will lead their private lives with unprecedented mobility and safety from coercion, or whether every move they make, geographic, economic, or amorous, We'll be visible to who possesses whatever may then constitute, quote, lawful authority.
I mean, think about how prescient that was.
He was saying, look, there are child molesters out there.
There are people who are poor and there are people who are plotting terrorism.
But in the scope of the dangers of our society and the massive loss to humanity from not allowing a free Internet to exist, from not having privacy online, that balance is so out of whack, just like it would be out of whack to allow police to enter our homes with no search warrants.
And he envisioned exactly this, that governments would be able to convince people to allow these security agencies that operate in secret to use the internet to spy on people in every single realm of their life, which is exactly what the internet has become, and to control the flow of information, which is exactly what governments are trying to do.
And the way they justify it is always the same.
Now let me just, we have Congressman Davidson on the phone, and I just want to Show you one more thing, which is, when we did the Snowden reporting, one of the main arguments that was used was that, oh, the spying technology is necessary for child pornographers, for terrorists, and of course they used it, as the Snowden reporting showed, for every single other conceivable means.
That was the pretext that they used it for.
A small percentage of the spying was used for that.
Much more spying, the vast majority in fact, was used for other political and economic and social purposes.
Very little of it had to do with terrorism or pornography or child sex crimes.
And this is something as the Daily Mail in August of 2021 recalled that Edward Snowden had been warning about for a long time that big tech companies were permitting spying software by claiming that it was necessary for all the sorts of things that people fear most when in fact it was going to be used by the security state agencies in order to eliminate privacy online.
And then beyond the Pavel Durov incident, as I referenced earlier, he received from Reuters in August of 2024, X says it is closing operations in Brazil due to a judge's content orders that the massive Avalanche of censorship orders that come from Brazil to the court, fraud to X, and the threats that the court has been making to arrest X's officials, like they did the Facebook official, has made it impossible for X to physically operate in Brazil.
This is the trend toward which we're headed.
We're the only platforms that we will have are platforms that either succumb and obey blindly every order of invasion of privacy and censorship and transfer of data to governments or Not only face banning at the IP level to make these platforms unavailable these free platforms are available now increasingly to criminalize it so that the people who try and provide free speech platforms are turned into felons themselves.
And I think, again, it's not doesn't take that much work to see how alarming that is.
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I know a lot of people think that as you get older, your sort of learning process is done, you're fixed in your ways.
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Congressman Warren Davidson is a Republican who represents the 8th Congressional District in Ohio and has done so since 2016.
Prior to that, he had a very impressive and long-standing military career as a military official.
He has often been an outspoken Yeah, always an honor.
of the U.S. policy of fueling and funding the war in Iraq, as well as attempts to denigrate and degrade our online freedoms.
And so we thought he was a perfect guest to join us for tonight to talk about several of the events that are in the news.
Congressman Davidson, it's great to see you again.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.
Yeah, always an honor.
Thanks, Glenn.
Absolutely.
So why don't we start with Ukraine?
That is a war that we have been covering a lot.
It's amazing how it's almost missing entirely from our election and even from our discourse.
There has been this major escalation in the war where the United States, Biden administration, gave the Ukrainians permission to use American weapons on Russian soil, which they are now doing with an actual invasion, incursion into Russian territory.
At the same time, the war in Ukraine seems to be getting even worse for the Ukrainians.
The front line is crumbling.
What do you see in terms of where we are with this war and specifically in terms of US and NATO policy?
What is the endgame here?
Yeah, I mean, that is the purpose of the bill we introduced called the Define the Mission Act.
You know, I introduced that in the first summer after the war started, and that was really the first question to be asked before we decided whether we were going to give them a dime.
We should have said, what exactly is the mission?
Not necessarily what is Ukraine's mission, but what is America's?
What are we trying to accomplish?
And the Biden administration has never answered that.
to this day.
But we have kind of made that the narrative and we got that requirement included in this year's Defense Authorization Act.
The deadline to reply to that is, you know, over.
So, you know, we're trying to, you know, condition any future aid to saying you got to at least tell us what you're trying to accomplish.
Right now, they've got everything from regime change in Russia, including war crimes tribunals to Vladimir Putin, on the one hand, or maybe the least extreme is to say the war doesn't spread to any other NATO country.
And And, you know, the American people certainly don't want the war to spread.
They're rooting for Ukraine to succeed.
But they, you know, my base thing is the United States doesn't have to get into every war we're invited to.
We certainly don't need to fund all the wars that we're invited to, and we should at least not seek out extra ones, and it seems like we've crossed all those thresholds here in Ukraine.
Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a lot of suffering in the world.
There's a lot of conflict and fighting all the time.
Some of that directly affects U.S.
interests.
Most of it does not.
We're a country that is protected by two oceans.
We do have certainly the strongest military in the world, and that obviously provides a lot of protection, as well as this massive nuclear arsenal.
That's the thing that I want to focus on, because what has concerned me the most from the beginning Is that this obviously creates a very real opportunity for there to be some sort of quasi direct or actually direct conflict between the United States and NATO on the one hand and Russia on the other.
And the reason that's so daunting, as you know, is because Russia still possesses the largest nuclear stockpile on the planet.
It seems like when you now look at this new escalation of Ukrainian Yeah, I mean, for the same reasons that you do.
actually invading Russian soil, using American weapons that the Biden administration has given them the go ahead, the green light to use in order to invade Russia on Russian soil.
That seems not just to be about we're funding a war that doesn't interest us, but it seems like that creates a great deal of danger.
Does this newest incursion into Russia worry you?
Yeah, I mean, for the same reasons that you do.
And look, at some point, just as we would do, anyone would rationally say tactical support at some point crosses a line into tactical participation.
And And in this case, I think Russia and a lot of the world is seeing it for what it is.
It's an act of desperation.
Ukraine is really saying, look, we're out of ways to continue to hold ground in Ukraine.
We're losing manpower.
Even if we cut as big a check as often as they say they want to cut it, as much as it takes, as long as it takes, that's the de facto mission the Biden administration has agreed to.
Without ever defining exactly what that is.
Russia doesn't have the manpower or expertise to employ that much combat power to stop Russia in the long run.
So a counter offensive really was, you know, rational in war fighting.
But the problem for America and NATO is, you know, our first order of business ought to be to make sure this war doesn't spread to us, because Ukraine is not a member of NATO.
We can be incredibly sympathetic, and yet not decide to get involved in the war.
We're obviously just a couple months away from a national election, and so everything, including the war in Ukraine, has a direct bearing on that.
We don't know very much about what Kamala Harris thinks because her campaign is designed to obscure that, but one thing we know for sure is that she gave a speech at that convention And the part about the war in Ukraine was as emphatic and adamant as it can be, vowing to just continue to send tens of billions of dollars without end to Ukraine based on this pipe dream that one day the Ukrainians are going to expel the Russians from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, which I don't think the Russians would ever allow to happen because they see that as such a direct threat.
What do you think is and would be the policy of President Trump?
Has he expressed support for this bill that you've introduced that has been pending for some time?
And do you think he would have a different policy on Ukraine than, say, the Biden administration?
Oh, he clearly would.
And I mean, first of all, no one really believes this war would have expanded the way that it did when Donald Trump was president.
And we can say for sure it didn't when he was president.
And he had a much more focused foreign policy.
So I think at this point, you know, the war is underway.
Donald Trump has said he would work to end it.
And what we're finding, as Robert Kennedy pointed out in his speech Friday, the Biden administration has scuttled plans for peace that were agreed upon between Zelensky and Russian negotiators.
So the Biden administration basically said to Ukraine, don't take the deal.
We're going to keep cutting you checks.
Just keep fighting the war.
And, you know, go back into the context.
In 2013, at the end of 2013, Ukraine was going to enter into a trade deal with the European Union and instead Russia made a sweeter offer and the leaders of Ukraine at the time decided to enter into a trade deal with Russia.
The Europeans didn't take that well, nor did lots of people inside Ukraine.
So there was a whole coup.
They overthrew the government.
And that was what happened in 2014.
It was called the Maidan coup, Maidan Square.
And ultimately, that's when Russia, under the Obama administration, seized Crimea, because that's where their Black Sea fleet, a big component of their naval power, is located in Crimea.
They're not going to give that up.
I mean, they view it as an existential threat.
Russia.
But the other thing that happened, look, we're coming up on the three-year anniversary of the dumbest possible way to exit Afghanistan on August 31st of 2021.
But on September 1st of 2021, the United States entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Ukraine to support their membership in NATO and the European Union.
And so things continue to escalate since then.
And everything that the Biden administration has done, and frankly, a lot of leaders in both parties have supported, has been to escalate and expand the war instead of resolve it.
And I think Donald Trump will bring the right kind of leadership.
And it's a voice that J.D.
Vance has had as a senator from the state of Ohio that said, you know, we should be seeking to contain this war, not expand it.
And I think everyone's right to believe that Donald Trump would do that.
And importantly, the NATO countries believe that he would do that because they're trying to Trump-proof their NATO policy or Trump-proof their Ukraine policy, which are really one in the same, a way to expand NATO.
Absolutely.
While I have you, I want to ask you about this very controversial arrest of the founder and CEO of the social media app Telegram, which provides more privacy and more free speech than, say, Facebook or Google does, and that has bothered a lot of people.
And the French government responded by arresting The Russian-born CEO of Telegram, when he arrived on his private jet at an airport just outside France, a prosecutor said today that the case is based on a theory that when you offer privacy online, when you offer free speech online, you become, quote, complicit in the crimes that other people commit using your platform.
I think a good analogy would be like arresting AT&T executives because somebody used one of their phone lines to plan a crime and AT&T didn't intervene and stop it.
Nobody obviously wants child pornographers or drug traffickers to be able to use the Internet freely or without detection, but at the same time it seems like it's a pretty dangerous thing to allow governments to start arresting social media executives if they don't comply with every government order.
How do you look at this arrest in the overall context of the cause of preserving free speech on the Internet?
It makes me incredibly concerned about Western civilization.
And really, ever since COVID, it's kind of obvious that there's a real peril for Western civilization to cross over into dystopian kind of future.
I mean, you look at the past, it is looking unfortunately like the future with periods of bad government and authoritarian leadership.
The United States has been the exception, the shining city on the hill, and the Bill of Rights doesn't give us the right to free speech.
Our founders recognized that our rights as human beings come from our Creator, and the whole point of the Bill of Rights is to limit the ability of government to deprive us of the natural order of things.
Of course you have a right to free speech.
And they rightly viewed that the bigger danger is that someone would be the decider of what is good speech and bad speech, what is disinformation and misinformation.
And the remedy for bad speech is good speech, and you should just have more speech.
And there's great peril in what is going on around the world.
And frankly, what the Biden-Harris administration They said they wanted to create a disinformation governance board, which was rightly deemed a ministry of truth, where they become the deciders of what's free speech.
Meta Today put out a paper where Mark Zuckerberg agreed that, yeah, this is what we've been doing.
We've been engaged in censorship.
And that's probably why Mark Zuckerberg isn't in jail in France, and Pavel is, because he wasn't playing along with the European Union or France's narrative of, we want to choose what speech is there.
And when you look at the political events going on in France, well, it's pretty obvious why they want to silence free speech.
One thing I want to ask you is, I remember when I started doing the Snowden reporting, I was hearing from a lot of people in the military who didn't necessarily approve of the leak itself or the decision that Snowden made to leak, but certainly the reporting about the abuses of the surveillance system, the kind of opening up of the U.S.
security state was something that I guess it was a surprise to me.
A lot of the people in the military were writing to me to say they thought we needed more of that, I think, and they started realizing and they started saying that people in the military sort of see more than anybody else how these powers can be abused, that the sort of closed system around the security state can threaten the freedoms that people join the military to defend.
You have become, I think, one of the most effective defenders of free internet and free speech online.
I'm just wondering What role your long background as a military officer has in forming your views of these questions?
Look, you know, I enlisted in the Army.
I graduated high school back in 88.
The Cold War was going on and, you know, I wanted to enlist in the Army.
So, you know, I did that shortly after high school and then got sent over to Germany.
I was over there in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and, you know, that Thanksgiving I went from where I was in Germany to Berlin and got to see people breaking down chunks of the Berlin Wall, brought some of it back for friends and family.
But the people weren't looking for more government.
They were looking for more freedom.
They had experienced all the government they could take, and they finally were able—we didn't tear the wall down.
Mr. Gorbachev didn't tear the wall down.
They tore their own wall down because they found out that they had been lied to.
And I was speaking with this guy who just couldn't believe what he was seeing with his own eyes across in West Berlin.
He had been told we were more poor than they were and we had a couple blocks for show just like they did.
And that's what you're seeing when you look over the fence.
But in his first hours across the border, he couldn't believe that the stores were open at night and there's fresh milk and everyone can go in, not just the party officials.
I'm like, yeah, they want everyone to go in, so they sell more stuff.
So it was clear he didn't really understand our system.
And then from there, you know, I got the chance to go to West Point, get a great education, come back as an army officer, infantry officer, serving Ranger Regiment with people that truly, the oath is to support and defend the Constitution.
And this is the document that really makes America such a distinct place in the world.
And our country is worth defending.
And it's not a president that we defend.
It's the values that this document, the Constitution, tried to protect, that the Declaration established and the Constitution tries to implement.
And it is a real treasure.
I think the only thing that Snowden did, he didn't follow the correct process for being a whistleblower.
But when did he go public?
He went public when Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, came before Congress, a body he's supposed to be accountable to, and lied and said, we do not do that.
And the reality is Snowden said, Oh, yes, you do.
I know you do.
And so he made known crimes that were going on.
And instead, the government targeted him as the criminal.
Yeah, I remember when the student reporting started, former officials of the East German Stasi, which were the most menacing and invasive surveillance agents probably on the planet, came out and said, wow, we didn't have anywhere near these capabilities that the NSA has developed in terms of the scope and the ability to just kind of engage in this ubiquitous surveillance.
Last question I want to ask you, we've talked before about the TikTok bill, I believe the last time that you were on my show.
As I recall the date, this is the last question I have for you, but did the date For the either the forced sell-off or the banning of TikTok is early 2025, which I think was strategically done to avoid that happening in the middle of an election.
Where are we with that?
Do you think the legal challenges are seeming to go through?
Is there any progress on the sell-off of TikTok?
Or what are the prospects that that might be actually shut in the United States?
Well, the Biden-Harris administration trying to keep this as secret as Kamala Harris's positions on policy because, to your point, they didn't accidentally pick a date out past the election.
They don't want it to be part of the election discussion.
And look, unfortunately, this was very similar to the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act People say it was George W. Bush that pushed it.
It was 99 to 1 in the Senate, or 98 to 1.
I think one person wasn't there.
So 98 to 1, it was a Democrat who voted no in the Senate.
In the House, there were 63 no votes, and about 2 to 1 Democrat to Republican voted no on the Patriot Act.
So overwhelmingly bipartisan, let's spy on Americans more with the Patriot Act.
We saw how that was abused.
That was kind of the point of Snowden's disclosure.
You look at the TikTok ban, it was essentially it was 65 no votes in the House, 15 Republicans, 50 Democrats.
And it is it is a terrible bill.
It is a way to the infringements on speech are preceded by infringements on privacy.
And that's exactly what goes with the TikTok bill.
It goes after the privacy, it goes after the ability to operate.
They want to disgorge private property if it can exist.
And obviously, I think the parent company is just going to do sort of like Elon Musk did in Brazil and say, yeah, we're just not going to be in that market.
Absolutely.
Congressman, it's always great to see you.
I think you're a very important voice in the House, and I hope and I have no doubt that you will continue to be that.
