How Telegram became the Durov brothers’ weapon against surveillance

Speaking at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in late February, Pavel Durov looked like a man in control. Dressed all in black — a nod to the character of Neo in the film The Matrix — Durov strode across the stage assertively. Like Neo, he was a programmer on a mission.

Durov had come to Barcelona to announce that Telegram, the encrypted messaging service, had gathered 100 million monthly users and was gaining an impressive 350,000 new subscribers per day.

But his triumph was about more than just business success. It came about two years after the tech entrepreneur fled Russia after losing VKontakte, Russia’s biggest social network, to allies of the Kremlin.