Technology

“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.

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.”

I mean, I can send a GPG-encrypted message over a messaging platform and you can recover it if you want even if that platform's native encryption is backdoored, but you're still just looking at an end-to-end encrypted message.

$ gpg -q --quick-gen-key tal@lemmy.today
About to create a key for:
    "tal@lemmy.today"

Continue? (Y/n) y

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

$ gpg -q --quick-gen-key doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria
About to create a key for:
    "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"

Continue? (Y/n) y

$ gpg -a --export doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria >doctor-doom.public-key.asc

Back at tal's computer:

$ gpg --import <doctor-doom.public-key.asc
$ echo "Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!" >message.txt
$ gpg -a -r doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria -u tal@lemmy.today -e message.txt
$ cat message.txt.asc
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----

hF4DjahcIPqAf9cSAQdA/itkkQNubd3l6V1Rs1c00Z4zDquk9PrK1Z65VzNogzsw
8ypbEn0B145fyyfyeAc8r72J51qJbcTXVGQkb9JWXoLMh/irZZkYrUbuaBXephsm
0oQBqv6JgWc8kpeFKSihu69EXG/kEcHpOyCBb2nGOerHM1VzERdTdcfkgEQQYfYF
sPXVfRxGgJbGtkoyRGDGZCEnOpGDsQSCX8I8KkUfPALAqhBSmYbAa5lg0jWNiAQL
J4rrXGQiVCPC5Dr45KIEswddFI1oGhqZo16SgEGILcTiY4gN6yI=
=4RyB
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----

tal sends the message to Doctor Doom over the backdoored messaging system. French intelligence watches closely. They break the platform-native encryption, but all they can see is the above text.

On Dr. Doom's computer:

$ gpg -d message.txt.asc 
gpg: encrypted with cv25519 key, ID 8DA85C20FA807FD7, created 2026-05-10
      "doctor.doom@headquarters.latveria"
Hey, Doctor Doom!  The time is right to initiate our secret plan!
$