Emmanuel Macron has shown he has no problem standing up to Russian authorities. During the end of his successful campaign last year, the president of France banned Russian state media outlets Sputnik and Russia Today from attending his events. At a news conference last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin was visibly uncomfortable while listening to Macron’s resolute explanation about banning the two Russian media outlets.
Macron has even taken to Telegram, the messaging app designed in Russia by entrepreneur Pavel Durov to preserve privacy from eavesdropping ears at the Kremlin and the current favorite messaging service by members of the blockchain community.
Now, however, security concerns inside the Élysée Palace are pushing development of a French-built WhatsApp-like messaging app to be used only by government officials.
Speaking recently to public radio channel France Inter, Mounir Mahjoubi, secretary of state in charge of digital affairs, said the government is building its own messaging encryption service to avoid foreign spies, writes French news website Atlantico.fr. The application will be launched this summer.
“Within this government, I am responsible for the transformation of the country’s digital tools,” Mahjoubi said on France Inter. “We are working on an encrypted public messaging service that will not depend on what the private sector is offering us.”
The move by Paris comes as Europe is pushing for improved security of personal information in the digital space. The French measure is not intended to compete with any of the private existing services, Guillaume Poupard, the head of the national cybersecurity agency of France, said on the business radio station BFM Business. The French government is only looking at customizing open source code to better serve its security issues, as well as allow it to store information on France-based servers, Poupard said.
“Based on what we have available today in open source, with a bit of well-led development and well-chosen expertise, our mission is to propose [to the government] a competing service that will be handled by servers that are not located in random countries or in Europe, but that are protected here [in France].”
Several French officials, including Macron, have said they are fond of Telegram, a free instant messaging service rivaling WhatsApp and advertising better security, and higher speed, while encrypting all messages and allowing them to self-destruct. In July of 2016, L’Express reported that Macron and several ministers switched to Telegram because of fears they would be spied on.
“The irony is that [the application] was created by the Russians wanting to escape the information services in Moscow,” wrote Emmanuel Paquette and Marcelo Wesfreid for L’Express. The irony goes even further as last week the Russian government banned Telegram for refusing to hand encryption keys to its software, making the app even more popular among skeptics, according to Forbes.
Speaking to news agency Reuters, a French government spokesperson said the app built by the government will use open source code. The goal is to make the app mandatory for all government workers by this summer and could eventually be made available some day to all French citizens.
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