In a joint appeal released on Sunday, April 21, signed by the heads of all European national police forces, Europol is calling for an end to the encryption of messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal.
Over the last decade or so, most mass-market messaging systems have implemented end-to-end encryption measures to protect their users. This technology makes a message unreadable, except by its sender and recipient. Neither the company that produces the messaging system, nor a hacker or investigator who intercepts it, can read it.
These measures, which the producers of these messaging systems say are essential to guarantee the security of a message against hackers, have been strongly criticized by police forces and certain governments. Last year, Gérald Darmanin, the French interior minister, called for the implementation of "backdoors," in other words, the deliberate introduction of vulnerabilities whose key would be communicated only to law enforcement agencies.
This idea is unanimously opposed by encryption specialists, who note that any vulnerability will necessarily end up being discovered and exploited by spies and criminals the world over. In February, the Court of the European Union also ruled that imposing a generalized weakening of encryption would be contrary to European law.
In its text published on Sunday, Europol is less precise, evoking the idea that "technical solutions do exist; they simply require flexibility from industry as well as from governments." This may be an allusion to the highly controversial European CSAM (or "chat control") proposal, which aims to require phone manufacturers to proactively detect child pornography images recorded on the devices they build. This draft directive, still under discussion in Brussels, has suffered several setbacks in the European Parliament.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.