Headline:  Founder & CEO of Telegram, Pavel Durov, was just arrested in France at the airport as he arrived from Azerbaijan.

Reality: The First Amendment is unique to the United States.

Further, we (the United States) have a history of attempting to attack encryption.  Who remembers that debate and people literally printing the code for PGP on a t-shirt?  Yes, the people's capacity to do this has been upheld and ultimately the government gave up but they did try it.

End-to-end encryption, of course, pisses governments off because the operator of the service doesn't have the keys so absent an intentional flaw (usually in the keying because modern cryptography is extremely difficult to actually break) forget it -- you can eventually break it but by then the people communicating will already be dead and you can't prosecute a corpse, the information will be of no value -- or both.

So am I particularly surprised that a European nation considers end-to-end encryption when they have reason to believe it is used to facilitate a criminal act a crime standing alone and the parties who operate it to be jointly and severably liable?

Not really.

Note that the United States has constraints, and they mean it too -- its a felony to violate these constraints -- on export of certain technology or even allowing certain nationals to use said things.  The regulations are called "ITAR" and they're not a joke.  Things you can buy and own perfectly-legally as a US citizen, if you send them overseas, can be a felony offense.

So spare me the breathless outrage.  This guy knew full well that some other nations would take extreme exception to what he was doing, and he did it anyway.  If he didn't know which nations those were and where he could and couldn't travel without the risk of being arrested then he's really not very bright.

Personally, I find the premise of attempting to constrain encrypted communications to be foolish; its a war that governments cannot win but that doesn't mean they won't try, and it also won't do a bit of good to raise that as a legal defense if they come after you.