The delegation, an eight-member body composed of four deputies and four senators, published its findings on Monday after months of work on a recurring question in the French parliament. “The inability to access the content of encrypted communications is a major obstacle to the work of the justice system and intelligence services,” the delegation wrote, regarding end-to-end encryption as a problem to be solved rather than a security to be preserved.
Technology using end-to-end encryption is exactly the thing that delegation wants to weaken. Decryption keys reside on user devices, not on company servers, meaning the platforms that hold your messages can’t read them. That’s the design and the point. Remove that asset and security will end because a system that lets investigators read messages on demand is also a system that can be misused, leaked, subpoenaed or hacked.
French police and intelligence services have spent years complaining about this technology. They can still intercept phone calls and SMS messages the old-fashioned way with a judge’s warrant, but encrypted platforms revolve around that ability entirely.
The delegation acknowledged that investigators already have a workaround called RDI, or “collection of digital data,” which could involve compromising a target’s device and collecting its contents in bulk, using what officials call “remote interception,” remote capture, or surveillance. This technology gives security services access to everything on the phone, not just the messages they are tracking. The delegation described it as inadequate anyway.
Senator Cedric Perrin, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee and sits on the intelligence delegation, has been leading the fight for more than a year. During the debate on the drug trafficking bill, he secured an amendment that would force messaging platforms to “implement the necessary technical measures to allow intelligence services to access the intelligible content of communications and data passing through them.”
Refusal to comply resulted in fines of up to 2 percent of worldwide annual revenue. The Senate passed it. The National Assembly shunned it, Macronist representatives, leftists and even the Rassemblement National rejected it.
Perrin’s definition then was that no fundamental change was taking place. “I don’t see how there would be any difference between what is done today with SMS and email and what will be done tomorrow with WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram,” he said at the time, with support from then-Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau and Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin.
The argument treats encrypted messaging as just another communication channel that should be within the reach of the state, ignoring that the whole reason these platforms exist is to occupy a different category.
RN deputy Aurélien López-Liguori, who opposed the amendment, raised an apparently technical objection. “This is a complete misunderstanding of what encryption means. Decryption keys are at the level of users’ devices. The keys are not centralized somewhere within the platform. Then you have to install backdoors for all communications, which goes far beyond the scope of fighting drug trafficking. The first hacker who comes will have access to our communications,” he warned.
Translated into engineering terms, his point was what cryptographers have been making for thirty years. There’s no such thing as a backdoor that only good people can use.
Perrin now offers a different framing. “Article 8 Ter, which I adopted, was not aimed at obtaining the encryption key at all, but at involving a ghost partner in the conversation before encryption,” he says.
The “ghost participant” approach, sometimes called the ghost user proposal, was released by GCHQ in 2018 and was rejected by every major privacy organization, civil liberties group, and security researcher who looked at it. The idea is that the platform silently adds a third recipient, an invisible intelligence agent, to a purportedly two-person conversation. Users never see them.
Encryption technically still works, except where one of the parties is a state.
Perin also rejected the suggestion that civil liberties were at risk. “Protecting public liberties is our concern as parliamentarians. This was addressed through various administrative and judicial investigations. The work done within the delegation was about getting a clear technical picture of what is possible and what is not. It is interesting that the RN, which constantly emphasizes its desire to protect the French people, does not want to give the intelligence services the tools to do so,” he said.
The delegation’s report concluded that targeted access is not technically out of reach and noted that an expert group convened by the European Commission is working on a technical roadmap to explore how such access could be achieved. This means that a technical problem that cryptographers are describing as insoluble is being treated as a project management exercise.
Of course, mass surveillance is not what the delegation is proposing. The fear is not that a French investigator will read every WhatsApp message. The fear is that the infrastructure built for targeted access has a way of increasing, that the authentication mechanisms built for terrorism cases end up being used in organized crime cases, then drug cases, then immigration cases, then political surveillance cases, and that a French ghost-user system is demanded by less democratic governments.
Not everyone in the Senate’s right- and center-right majorities agrees with the direction of the delegation. Centrist Union senator Oliver Caddick secured an amendment to a separate bill on the resilience and cybersecurity of critical infrastructure that would do the opposite, writing encryption protections into French law and prohibiting any obligation on messaging services to install backdoors. The Senate adopted it in March 2025.
The Intelligence Delegation’s report attacks that text directly, claiming that “this new Article 16BIS will weaken the legal framework for intelligence and investigative techniques and hinder their implementation.” Caddick’s argument was one that the delegation was determined to ignore. He said, “I’m clearly in favor of tracking criminals, but not with tools that can bring us down. We should not create our own vulnerabilities.” His bill was examined in a National Assembly committee in September and has since been stalled.
Earlier this year, then-Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu appointed Deputy Florent Baudy, chairman of the National Assembly’s law committee, to examine “possible changes to the existing legal framework” to grant investigators access to encrypted communications. The legislative channel for any new effort is undecided, with lawmakers waiting to see what Boudi produces, but reportedly ready for a new proposal de loi if needed.
What is going on in France is not really a debate about whether intelligence services should have the tools to investigate serious crime. They already do. They have RDI rights to compromise individual devices, surveillance algorithms expanded last year, satellite interception powers, traditional wiretaps, metadata access and cooperation with every French telecom operator.
The new fight is about whether a category of communications that currently resists state interception, secured by mathematics rather than promise, should be reshaped so that resistance disappears. The delegation has replied in the affirmative. Cryptography has not changed. There is political will to ignore what cryptography says.
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