GoKawiilFrance’s intelligence delegation in parliament has formally backed breaking the encryption that protects WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram conversations, recommending that magistrates and intelligence agents be granted what lawmakers describe as targeted access to messages that platforms currently cannot read even themselves.
The delegation, an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its conclusions on Monday after months of work on a question that keeps returning to the French Parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications constitutes a major obstacle for the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, framing end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a protection to be preserved.
The technology end-to-end encryption uses is precisely the thing the delegation wants weakened. Decryption keys live on user devices, not on company servers, which means the platforms holding your messages genuinely cannot read them. That’s the design and the point. Strip that property away and the protection collapses because a system that lets investigators read messages on demand is also a system that can be abused, leaked, subpoenaed, or hacked.
French police and intelligence services have spent years complaining about this tech. They can still intercept old-fashioned phone calls and SMS messages with a judge’s warrant but encrypted platforms route around that capability entirely.
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The delegation acknowledged that investigators already have a workaround called RDI, or “collection of digital data” which can involve compromising a target’s device and harvesting its contents wholesale through what officials call “remote interception,” remote captures. That technique gives security services access to everything on a phone, far more than just the messages they’re chasing. The delegation called it inadequate anyway.
Senator Cédric Perrin, who chairs the foreign affairs committee and sits on the intelligence delegation, has been pushing this fight for over a year. During debate on a narcotrafic bill, he secured an amendment that would have forced messaging platforms to “implement the necessary technical measures in order to allow intelligence services to access the intelligible content of communications and data passing through them.”
Refusal to comply carried fines of up to 2 percent of worldwide annual revenue. The Senate passed it. The National Assembly killed it, with the Macronist deputies, the left, and even the Rassemblement National voting it down.
Perrin’s framing then was that nothing fundamental was changing. “I don’t see how there would be any difference between what is done today with SMS and emails and what would be done tomorrow with WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram,” he said at the time, with backing from then-Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin.
The argument treats encrypted messaging as just another communication channel that should sit within reach of the state, ignoring that the entire reason these platforms exist is to occupy a different category.
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