Laws mandating encryption backdoors have been demanded by French and German ministers who met on Tuesday.

France's interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve and his German counterpart Thomas de Maizière, speaking at a joint press conference, called for EU legislation that would force firms to hand over crypto keys to police investigations in order to "truly arm our democracies on the issue of encryption."

Cazeneuve—while claiming to support "the principle of encryption"—said that "exchanges made via applications like Telegram must be able to be identified and used in legal proceedings."

The two men have asked Brussels' officials to study the possibility of a legislative act requiring operators to remove illegal content or decrypt messages in the course of investigations, whether they are headquartered in Europe or not.

The European Commission is currently reviewing the ePrivacy Directive which sets out obligations for confidentiality of communications. However, Article 15 of the law allows national governments to take "legislative measures to restrict the scope of the rights and obligations" on confidentiality for national security and law enforcement purposes.

"Paradoxically, the ePrivacy proposal is a threat to end-to-end encryption and thus to users’ privacy," international policy director for the Computer and Communications Industry Association Christian Borggreen told Ars. “It is certainly understandable that some would respond to recent tragedies with backdoors and more government access. But weakened security ultimately leaves online systems more vulnerable to all types of attacks from terrorists to hackers. This should be a time to increase security—not weaken it,” he added.

Last month, the European Data Protection Supervisor warned that "the new rules should also clearly allow users to use end-to-end encryption (without 'backdoors') to protect their electronic communications. Decryption, reverse engineering, or monitoring of communications protected by encryption should be prohibited."

But Cazeneuve and de Maizière are determined that the issue should be on the agenda for the next meeting of EU leaders in Bratislava on September 16. They also called for the signing and ratification of the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, and better critical information sharing between member states.

As Ars reported on Monday, de Maizière has also demanded the use of facial recognition tech at German airports and train stations to identify terror suspects.

But de Maiziere's plan would require huge funding and is unlikely to get public support, a leading German facial recognition firm has told Ars.

"Using the technology for security applications would require large-scale computing and bandwidth resources, along with substantial work flow and integration changes. While funding, installation, and rollout could be realised in two to three years, adjusting privacy laws and gaining widespread support from the general public may take years ahead of such a project or even bring it to a halt,” said Cognitec's spokesperson Elke Oberg.

Cognitec is responsible for the software behind Germany’s EasyPASS passport project which uses facial recognition tech for verification processes that compare the passport image to the live image of the person using the eGate. “The system does not support a connection to databases, nor does it store any facial images during the process,” Oberg claimed when quizzed.