San Francisco (AFP)

For once, Facebook and human rights associations agree: couriers must be encrypted, with no flaws or back doors that the authorities could use to access private exchanges between users when needed.

The demands of some governments to maintain exceptional access to services like WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) "would threaten the security and privacy of billions of internet users around the world," said more than 100 organizations and experts, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in an open letter issued on Tuesday.

On Monday, Facebook vice presidents in charge of WhatsApp and Messenger, Will Cathcart and Stan Chudnovsky, sent a similar missive to the US, British and Australian ministers who asked the group in October not to encrypt all of its platforms. without guaranteeing access to the police "so as to protect our citizens".

Many policymakers around the world want their country's justice system to recover e-mails, instant messages and photos that are exchanged on networks and stored on servers that are essential for criminal investigations.

But this request is difficult to reconcile with the imperative to respect the privacy of users.

"As a company serving 2.7 billion users worldwide, it is our responsibility to use the best available technology to protect their confidential data," argues Facebook.

- "Gift for criminals" -

"Encrypted email is at the forefront of online communication, and the overwhelming majority of the billions of digital messages sent daily, including on WhatsApp, iMessage (Apple, Ed) and Signal are already protected by end-to-end encryption in the end, "continues the internet giant.

The Californian group, which is regularly criticized for not sufficiently protecting the confidential data of its users, promised this fall to encrypt its instant messenger platform Messenger, as is already WhatsApp.

In October, in an open letter to Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg, US Justice Minister Bill Barr Kevin McAleenan, then Interior Minister, and their British counterparts Priti Patel and Australian Peter Dutton, asked him to not to complete this project "without including a means to legally access the content of communications so as to protect our citizens".

Facebook had already granted them a plea of ​​inadmissibility.

"The back doors that you ask for law enforcement would be a gift for criminals, pirates and repressive regimes ... and make our platforms more vulnerable, with potentially deleterious consequences in real life," continues the group.

"It is simply impossible to create such access by imagining that others will not try to use it too."

- Who's there ? -

Dozens of NGOs and security experts who signed Tuesday's letter abound in the direction of Facebook.

"Developers can not design systems that are intrinsically capable of determining if" bad guys "are using the service, just as engineers are not able to build sidewalks and highways that would only collapse under certain people" they notice.

Facebook also argues that its teams already cooperate extensively with the authorities, primarily for investigations of terrorism or child protection cases.

"WhatsApp detects and disallows 2 million accounts every month based on compromising clues and scans unencrypted information, such as profile or group information, to identify abusive content, such as exploit images. children, "say Cathcart and Stan Chudnovsky.

The social network focuses on the detection through artificial intelligence of accounts and problematic content upstream, before publication, and cross-references information from its various platforms to identify harmful actors.

According to the NGOs, building backdoors for investigators would not lead anywhere because criminals would simply use other couriers.

© 2019 AFP