The EU agency for judicial cooperation is going to develop a common approach to lawfully intercept services like Skype and Viber in order to help keep track of European militants arriving back home from the Middle East.

A committee of the European Parliament discussed the measures. Messenger security is under threat, because there are good reasons for networks and governments to have the capability to monitor criminals. Following deadly terror attacks in Paris last month, EU nations are worried about the danger of radicalized and trained Islamists returning from the Middle East. Militants have often used social networks to spread ideas, jihadist propaganda and recruit new members.

In the face of widespread Internet surveillance, we need a secure and practical means of talking to each other from our phones and computers. For years, privacy and security experts worldwide have called on the general public to adopt strong, open-source cryptography to protect our communications.

Many companies offer “secure messaging” products — but are these systems actually secure? The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s secure messaging scorecard made a list of mobile and Internet messaging services that scored well on privacy and security and the services that scored poorly. Let’s focus primarily on the most popular messengers.