Only authoritarians think that way. Fortunately France has a long history of eating their rich. It may be time to remember how to do it.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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“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!
$Playing high level chess, not unlike a certain Latvian guy called Mikhail...
I wonder if they understand, it'll be impossible to truly stop this.
Even if they get some of the low hanging fruit. People will just move to the more secure, distributed, and anonymous options.
Or are they actually ignorant enough to believe this is something they can solve.
They are not really after the encrypted messages themselves. They want to make any way of obscuring people's activities illegal to have a universal right to arrest and investigate anyone they can't reach remotely.
If mainstream communication platforms all drop any sort of encryption, you will have a relatively small amount of holdouts to manually straighten up.
Right now if you use encryption the authorities have no proof you're doing something illegal, because you might not be. But if they make (secure) encryption itself illegal, then anyone they aren't sure about suddenly becomes a criminal they're sure about. Then it's just a matter of selectively prosecuting those whom they most dislike. So it doesn't matter to them that much whether lots of people find a technical workaround. If they can't read your messages that's all they need to be able to silence you if you're inconvenient.
Most people don't know anything about encryption or privacy. The few who do care will find other options.
That's what I'm getting at. All the 'Bad Guys' who genuinely need the security to do bad things will just move to the other options, along with us tech savvy types. The only people they'll be able to spy on are the normies who aren't actually criminals...
Actually I think I get it now. I'm sure for many of them, it's not about catching criminals at all.
They don't care about the criminals though, it's the normies they want to spy on.
The criminals are going to do other stuff that's going to put them on a watchlist, it's almost inevitable. But normal people aren't going to do any of that, so they have "no need" to be protected by encryption.
That's what I just figured out.
People with power believe everything happens because they allow it and if they don't like it then they can just make it stop.
Leave it to Europe to take the wrong message from all of this and run with it.
