France moves to break encrypted messaging (opens in new tab)

The article is a lot more nuanced than the title or what most folks are discussing in comments. France has politicians voting in both directions and thus far the "keep encryption and enshrine it in law" side is ahead slightly.

> Senator Olivier Cadic, of the Centrist Union, secured an amendment to a separate bill on critical infrastructure resilience and cybersecurity that would do the opposite, writing encryption protection into French law and prohibiting any obligation on messaging services to install backdoors. The Senate adopted it in March 2025.

I wonder if they remove encryption how can they ensure who are the authors. Will they still apply all the certificates?

So in France you will not be able to send your friend gibberish text that only you and your friend understand. Will they also ban the ability to make new languages that only you and your friends understand. Will they also ban whispering?

Seems to me we're going to have to let the anti-encryption mob have their way until things go wrong—bigtime. No amount of expert advice will convince them until they witness firsthand the negative consequences of weakening encryption.

It's only afterwards and as a consequence some highly newsworthy disasters occur such as a child abduction or political sex scandal involving a high profile politician come to light that the lay public will get the message that weak encryption is effectively no encryption.

In the meantime criminals will be early adopters of more sophisticated messaging such as steganography.

This article incorrectly implies that Telegram is end-to-end encrypted, by putting it in the same line as WhatsApp and Signal.

Telegram doesn't even try to be end-to-end-encrypted by default. WhatsApp claims to be end-to-end-encrypted, but it's not open-source, Signal is end-to-end-encrypted.

I'm starting to think we need to make encryption a protected class, so that we can label speaking against it as hate speech.

Let's start putting some of these politicians in jail for being stupid.

How will they know what's encrypted? Maybe I just like sending random sequences of bytes across the wire

I remember a joke where a guy sent a joke to another via private message, and Xi Jinping laughed. It seems the government's mindset is the same everywhere.

Some people do not take no for an answer. This is bordering on absurd.

But on the other side what I miss is some explanation if forensic analysis helps here? Presumably the messages stay on a phone and you can recover them. If that is the case then it should be enough to fight the crime, i.e if you get a warrant to access the device then you can access messages, which I believe many would agree is fine.

I'll repeat this over and over:

Most EU politicians are aware of needing to lead from positions of deep unpopularity for the next 10-20 years, they're just setting the stage to have the tools to suppress dissent at their disposal. After encryption, my bet is on reduced rights to protest (see UK wanting to ban protests that repeatedly "cause disruption").

I still don't understand the note that the companies can't decrypt the messages with e2e encryption. Isn't it as simple as a software update that says:

"If user = foo, then send the on device keys elsewhere"?

Or if those keys are part of a TPM, then a software update that just asks it to send in the decrypted messages?

Can judges not order this now, but can order decryption if the keys are stored centrally?

Time to teach all your friends how to use a one-time pad. Could be a fun hobby for those with the right inclination.

"The excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case with freedom, which in a democracy often descends into anarchy... The excessive liberty of the individual in a democracy eventually leads to a desire for authoritarian rule, and out of that desire, the tyrant arises." - Plato's Republic

But not for French politicians and military, am I right?

Encryption for me not for thee?

> Mass surveillance, of course, isn’t what the delegation is proposing. The fear isn’t that a French investigator will read every WhatsApp message.

French investigators won't care about every WhatsApp message. But they definitely will slurp them all up, process them all with AI, and read them whenever they have an interest. And they will deny they are doing this as they do this.

Let’s start with the smartphones of politicians.

A public ballot should be held for this.

Governments act as kings.

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.. et Surveillance-té

Lets pretend this happens, I am curious how it would work.

So a person in Canada messages someone in France who's WhatsApp is not encrypted. But the message from Canada is encrypted. Will the person in Canada's message have to be sent unencrypted ? Or will WhatsApp Canada need to allow France to break Canada's encryption ?

Personally I think it would be easier for these apps to ban people in France from using their service.

One of many simultaneous attempts all around the world:

https://community.qbix.com/t/the-global-war-on-end-to-end-en...

And by the way, this article mentions other things already in place, such as being able to commandeer your device and spy on it without breaking encryption:

https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...

I find it fascinating that a country with citizens that are typically willing to protest in the streets at the drop of a hat don't seem to care. Is it that they aren't technically literate?

With the first link, the chain is forged.

We're into way many links already.

Isn't this the country that beheaded their rulers?

The big problem here is that Veracrypt development is done there if I'm not mistaken. Probably time to get back to trusted old TrueCrypt.

The world needs frontiers or stuff like this is the natural state.

To make the link with another very successful article on HN today: who is Franced rule by yet? By cyber-libertarians right?