Questioned by BFM TV, the Minister of the Interior spoke in favor of changing the law to allow intelligence services to take advantage of a back door to access the conversations of potential terrorists.
A week after the murder of literature professor Dominique Bernard in Arras, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, returned to the subject of messaging applications during an interview given this Thursday to BFM TV.
Asked about the means made available to intelligence and the DGSI to anticipate possible terrorist acts, the minister was particularly critical of encrypted messaging and in particular the impossibility for the authorities to access the conversations of suspicious people. :
Until yesterday, traditional telephone tapping informed us about serious crime and terrorism. Today people use Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp or Facebook, they send each other messages which do not go through a traditional telephone line either, but digitally, via the Internet. These are encrypted messages [NDLR : sic], it’s a selling point and a lot of people use them, including people who are evil. We must be able to negotiate a back door with these companies, that is to say “Mr. WhatsApp, Mr. Telegram, I suspect that Mr.
For Gérald Darmanin, legislation must evolve to allow direct access to the conversations of potential terrorists. However, he remains aware that the subject is “very complicated» notably due to the secrecy of private correspondence and necessary authorization by the judge or the prefect. In France, it is traditionally the judicial institution which guarantees respect for freedoms, including respect for private life and correspondence. Remember that already in August 2015, former prosecutor François Molins was critical of the subject of smartphone encryption.
The Interior Minister also explained how intelligence services can currently access users’ encrypted conversations: “I want to tell the French that we are able to go to WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. How do we do ? We do not recover the telephone conversation, we take possession of your phone“.
A complicated backdoor to set up
The main difficulty around this backdoor should not be legislative, but technical. The principle of these applications – WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, but also iMessages, Google Messages and Messenger – is that they use end-to-end encryption. Concretely, this means that the conversations can only be consulted by the different interlocutors and that even the messaging service does not keep them in plain text on its servers. To do this, the service would also need to have a decryption key, but this would go against the very principle of end-to-end encryption.
As Gérald Darmanin rightly indicates, encryption is indeed a selling point for these applications. However, this argument is not made so much for reasons of delinquency, but above all for questions of user security. It is thanks to this end-to-end encryption that users can be sure that their conversations cannot be hacked and viewable by hackers even if they were to access their account or the service’s servers. In the case of a backdoor, users may fear that it will be used in the same way by hackers.
Gérald Darmanin also points out that no legislation in the world has yet succeeded in imposing such a back door for encrypted messaging: “The law does not provide for this. It must be said honestly that no law in the world provides for this at the moment. It could be within the framework of immigration law. It’s a very complicated subject, because it’s private correspondence and we are very attached to it. I think that faced with the increasing terrorist threat, this is a question that democracies must ask the digital giants“.
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