An amendment to the “Narcotrafic” law is moving to the French National Assembly. Remind your legislators that a backdoor for the good guys only is not possible.
In April 2018, the French Government announced plans to create their own instant messaging tool.[26] Work on the application based on Riot and Matrix protocol—called Tchap [fr] after French scientist Claude Chappe—had started in early 2018,[27] and the program was open-sourced and released on iOS and Android in April 2019.[28]
The Tchap project created a new open source encrypted communication tool for French public agents in order to improve information dissemination and ensure the security of the French government communication network.
At present, only agents of the central administration can create an account on Tchap, but the code source of the application is available for anyone under an open source license. Gradually, its use will be extended to all members of the French administrations, including regional and local administrations. According to Jérôme Ploquin, Tchap Project Manager at the Interministerial Directorate for Digital Affairs (DINUM), the French administration wanted to “deploy a messaging service which is secure and contains the professional features adapted to the work of a professional organisation or a public administration”.
As far as I know from working in one of those administrations previously, the adoption of Tchap failed because of the bad UX around key exchange and people went back to Microsoft Teams. I couldn’t find any recent news about it in the French news. I would be curious to hear about someone using Tchap today.
I had no idea they used Matrix. That’s beyond hilarious. Surely they’ll just make an exception for themselves or something.
Sounds like it’s called “Tchap”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrix_(protocol)
https://interoperable-europe.ec.europa.eu/collection/open-source-observatory-osor/document/french-government-launches-house-developed-messaging-service-tchap
As far as I know from working in one of those administrations previously, the adoption of Tchap failed because of the bad UX around key exchange and people went back to Microsoft Teams. I couldn’t find any recent news about it in the French news. I would be curious to hear about someone using Tchap today.