The
French government is building its own encrypted messenger service to ease fears
that foreign entities could spy on private conversations between top officials,
the digital ministry said on Monday.
None
of the world's major encrypted messaging apps, including Facebook's WhatsApp
and Telegram - a favorite of President Emmanuel Macron - are based in France,
raising the risk of data breaches at servers outside the country.
About
20 officials and top civil servants are testing the new app which a
state-employed developer has designed, a ministry spoke woman said, with the
aim that its use will become mandatory for the whole government by the summer.
"We
need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted
by the United States or Russia," the spokeswoman said. "You start
thinking about the potential breaches that could happen, as we saw with Facebook,
so we should take the lead."
The
US social network, which bought WhatsApp in 2014, has drawn heavy criticism
since it acknowledged that information about many millions of users wrongly
ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytic.
The
French government's encrypted app has been developed on the basis of
free-to-use code found on the Internet and could be eventually made available
to all citizens, the spokeswoman said. She declined to give the names of either
the codes or the messaging service.
Macron's
inner circle - now government advisers or ministers - have grown fond of the
Telegram app, which they used to plot his rise to power and his presidential
election campaign last year.
Macron,
an economy minister in the previous Socialist administration, wanted at the
time to use an encrypted messaging service that even his rivals in the last
government could not crack, a close adviser to Macron told Reuters.
Since
then, most of his lawmakers have joined the app and the president himself can
often be seen online on Telegram, sometimes in the early hours of the morning.
But
privacy concerns started growing earlier this year, and security tools from
French security firm Thales installed on officials' work smartphones prevented
the use of either WhatsApp or Telegram.
Telegram
was set up by a Russian entrepreneur who has come into conflict with the
authorities. Russia's state telecommunications regulator said on Monday it had
begun blocking access to Telegram after the company refused to comply with an
order to give state security access to its users' secret messages.
Both
WhatsApp and Telegram promote themselves as ultra-secure because all their data
is encrypted from start to finish. WhatsApp relies on open industry standards
created by the developers behind Signal, a rival messaging app, while Telegram
relies on its own, home-grown encryption techniques.
