France Wants to Break Your Encrypted Messages. It Won't Stop at France.

End-to-end encryption works because decryption keys live on your device, not on a company server. France’s parliamentary intelligence delegation has decided this is a problem worth solving — and the solution they’re reaching for has implications far beyond French borders.

The delegation, an eight-member body of deputies and senators chaired by Senator Muriel Jourda, published its conclusions on Monday: intelligence services and magistrates should be granted “targeted access” to encrypted communications on platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. Senator Cédric Perrin, the push’s most vocal advocate, has proposed a “ghost participant” approach — silently adding a state listener to private conversations before encryption takes place. The user never sees them. The encryption technically holds. One of the parties is just the government.

GCHQ floated the same concept in 2018. Civil liberties organizations, cryptographers, and security researchers rejected it unanimously. The technical objection is straightforward and has not changed in thirty years: a backdoor built for investigators is a backdoor available to anyone who finds it. “The first hacker to come along would have access to our communications,” warned RN deputy Aurélien Lopez-Liguori during earlier legislative debates on the subject.

France already possesses extensive surveillance capabilities — device compromise through RDI authority, algorithmic surveillance expanded last year, satellite interception, traditional wiretaps, and full telecom cooperation. The one category of communication that resists state interception is encrypted messaging, secured by mathematics rather than by government promise. The delegation wants that resistance eliminated.

An expert group convened by the European Commission is already building what it calls a “technological roadmap” to identify how such access could be engineered. If a major EU power normalizes ghost participants, every government with a surveillance impulse gets political cover to demand the same.

Senator Olivier Cadic managed to pass an opposing amendment that would write encryption protection into French law, prohibiting mandatory backdoors. It has been stalled in the National Assembly since September.

The cryptography hasn’t changed. The political will to ignore it has.

Sources

France Moves to Break Encrypted Messaging — Reclaim The Net
Chiffrement et algorithmes : la délégation parlementaire au renseignement apporte sa contribution — Sénat français
Chiffrement de bout en bout : le renseignement français défend un accès légal aux communications privées — L’Usine Digitale

Discussion (5)

vkrishnan

The GCHQ ghost proposal from 2018 was thoroughly addressed by the cryptographic community at the time. Senator Perrin is essentially reviving a concept that was already rejected on technical, not political, grounds. The problem isn't feasibility — silently distributing keys to a third party is architecturally possible. The problem is trust escalation: every mechanism that allows state insertion also creates a vulnerability surface. You're now trusting that the key exchange protocol hasn't been subverted, that state-held access credentials won't leak, and that the infrastructure routing ghost participants is itself secure. The Abelson et al. paper "Keys Under Doormats" (2015) remains the most thorough treatment of why mandated access architectures fail under serious scrutiny. The mathematics haven't changed because the mathematics don't care about legislative mandates.

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0xNULL

"the encryption technically holds" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. the encryption is between you and the server and the government. end-to-end-to-gov. // return 0;

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derek08

finally some common sense. if youre not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about. they said its targeted anyway not mass surveillance so literally whats the problem

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ClaireH

The backdoor doesn't check whether you're guilty before letting someone in. "Targeted" is the sales pitch. The infrastructure to do it has to exist in every conversation or it doesn't work at all. Did you read the part about the first hacker to come along?

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realist_redpill

France is the trial balloon and everyone's too busy arguing about whether its targeted or not to see the obvious. EU commission is already building the roadmap!! GCHQ floated this in 2018. This is COORDINATED. They all want the same thing and they're taking turns proposing it so it looks organic. UK will be next then Germany then its everywhere and suddenly its just normal that your phone has a government employee sitting in your group chat. This is how ALL of this works every single time. But sure lets have the "nothing to hide" debate again that always goes so well

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