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The Justice Department has renewed its fight for access to encrypted communications, arguing that it is a vital crime-fighting tool even as technology companies and advocates have countered that it will threaten individual privacy.

Attorney General William P. Barr took aim at Facebook’s plan to make WhatsApp and its other messaging services more secure, pressing its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, to create a loophole to that goal of full encryption. The Justice Department said that investigators needed lawful access to encrypted communications to fight terrorism, organized crime and child pornography.

“Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes,” Mr. Barr, joined by his British and Australian counterparts, wrote in a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg that was reviewed by The New York Times and dated Friday. BuzzFeed News first reported on the letter.

Tech company officials have said that strong encryption is necessary to protect legitimate users of their platforms all over the world, including journalists and government critics. Facebook respects the role of law enforcement but believes people have a right to communicate privately online, said Andy Stone, a company spokesman.

“End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of over a billion people every day,” Mr. Stone said. “We strongly oppose government attempts to build back doors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.”

With 1.5 billion users, Facebook’s WhatsApp is perhaps the world’s most commonly used encrypted communications platform. Privacy experts and tech company officials said that creating a back door would effectively destroy the secrecy of such platforms.
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“We are being spied upon by everybody and everywhere,” said Susan Landau, a Tufts University computer security professor. “It is very easy to listen in on communications. Securing data is a clear national security interest.”

The Justice Department and its counterparts in Australia and Britain have long pushed for back doors to other tech platforms but are focusing on Facebook because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plan to add end-to-end encryption to all of the company’s platforms, a government official said in a background briefing for reporters on Thursday.

Mr. Barr and Britain’s home secretary, Priti Patel, signed a pact late Thursday that eases the legal barriers for American and British law enforcement agencies to request electronic data from tech companies in both countries for investigations into terrorism, child sexual abuse and other crimes. Under the current system, such requests can take up to two years to process.