Pavel Durov, founder of the encrypted instant messaging app Telegram Messenger, predicts that rising government surveillance will force the birth of secure communication devices inspired by cryptocurrency hardware wallets.

In a Tucker Carlson interview on April 17, Durov recalled past experiences while expressing how government entities continue to suppress the private exchange of information:

“The world is becoming less amenable. Governments are becoming less tolerant of privacy. And that’s clearly the trend because they have more technological power.”

However, Durov believes that growing oversight will force innovations around hardware devices dedicated to secure communications “in a similar way that we have hardware wallets to store your cryptocurrency.”

He claimed that the United States law enforcement agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), attempted to persuade people affiliated with Telegram to install backdoors for surveillance purposes.

Durov said that the geopolitical neutrality of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ideal for entrepreneurs fighting for privacy and anti-surveillance:

“It’s a small country that wants to be friends with everybody. It’s not aligned geopolitically with any of the big superpowers. And I think it’s the best place for a neutral platform like ours to be in if we want to make sure we can defend our users’ privacy and freedom of speech.”

Speaking about company ownership, Durov said he avoids venture capital (VC) investments to prevent external influence on the way Telegram operates. He revealed that he holds a “few hundred million dollars” in fiat and Bitcoin (BTC), which allows him to bootstrap his projects and companies with 100% ownership.

However, he did raise funds for a few projects in the past, one of which was a cryptocurrency project.

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Echoing Durov’s concerns about rising government surveillance, on April 16, American whistleblower Edward Snowden warned that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is only days away from “taking over the internet” with a massive expansion of its surveillance powers.

Snowden’s alert comes after Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, pointed out that through an “innocuous change” to the definition of “electronic communications surveillance provider” in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) 702 bill, the U.S. government could go far beyond its current scope and force nearly every company and individual that provides any internet-related service to assist with NSA surveillance.

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