Civil society organisations are alternatively named intermediary bodies in the French context. Those hybrid organizations suffer from a lack of legitimacy in the eyes of French public policy decision-makers. In this paper, we intend to examine how these organizations structure their organisational communication and how their leaders and spokespersons speak in order to ward off potential critics about their lack of legitimacy and representativeness. We focus on their public participation in the debates about contact-tracing smartphone-based apps, in the context of Covid-19 pandemics. Early spring 2020, the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemics led the French authorities to envision a nation-wide implementation of contact-tracing mobile app called StopCovid. A large public debate about the balance between medical usefulness and privacy implication of digital surveillance followed these announcements. More specifically, one of the topic was to discuss which actors (public vs. private, national vs. international) should take part in both software development and personal data management. These discussions implied different types of actors, which are classically mobilized in public debates: state, independent data controller (CNIL), Telcos and software developers, but in a relatively new manner also clubs, unions, activists NGOs, and think tanks – which are emerging actors in the field. The negative perceptions of civil societies organizations understood as intermediate bodies are based on a French politico-philosophical tradition which gives rise to Jean-Jacques Rousseau "social contract" theory according to which the general interest is not the sum of the particular interests or their regulated confrontation. The general will and public interest should only be expressed through electoral processes. As results, intermediary bodies such as interest groups, which intend to influence political decision-making processes, are perceived as not legitimate. Hence, these bodies need to euphemize the prescriptive dimension of their discourse The role of lobbies is “elusive” (Helgesson, Falasca, 2017), and the public perceives in a negative way the deontology and ethics of lobbying professionals, but this prejudice against intermediate bodies also affects other hybrid organizations, accused to sap the very foundation of French democratic system. Think tanks as well as clubs and advocacy associations and unions are hybrid organizations with no precise contours and in many regards, they cannot be seen as “crystallized phenomena” (Lavau, Cayrol, 1965). These peculiar intermediate bodies have in common the fact that they claim to rely on fact-checking, rigorous methodologies and scientific epistemology. These organizations present themselves as either apolitical or as gathering people from a wide political spectrum to qualify for the status of valuable experts. They also share the same priority “raison d’être” being by to influence the political policy process through strategic communication. They are therefore engaged in various strategic communication actions. The digital 2.0. era has indeed created new opportunities for the dissemination of the increasingly wide range of outputs. Notwithstanding the existing intermediation opportunities to speak to the public (twitter) and decisionmakers (phone-calls), all intermediate bodies’ spokespersons still rely on traditional mass media (print, tv, radio or web) to get attention. Hence, they have become regular press columnists, debate or news TV-show guests, and are interviewed in mass media (newspapers, tv-channels) still considered as a key source of political information and as playing a key role in the framing of perceptions and ideas. We intend to examine the emergence or crystallization of hybrid organisations’ discourse and identity through their participation in the framing of a “technical” discourse on contact-tracing smartphone-based apps. Framing effects theories highlights the role of shared cultural contexts, emphasizing the existence of frames beyond the individual level. Cultural aspects may involve organized sets of beliefs, values, and norms, materialized in features such as words, examples, arguments, metaphors and images. We mean to describe these as regards to intermediate bodies strategic communication discourse, both their collective writings released on their web-sites and social media (reports, pamphlets, position papers, twitter messages) and their individual public speaking in the national press (tribunes and interviews). Our first hypothesis is that these organisations may rely on various arguments such as public interest orientation and public health, scientific rationale and data analysis, legal environment and control reassurance (on privacy), but also pathos oriented arguments. Then we mean to show that their rhetoric is not only oriented toward the public (topdown from an expertise viewpoint) or the decision-makers (bottom-up from a power viewpoint), but also oriented towards their homologues, which are other intermediate bodies. We chose to focus on the rhetoric figure of prolepsis since it embodies this horizontal discourse pattern. Methodology To answer the research questions posed, focusing on how intermediate bodies portrays themselves as legitimate and useful to the general public enlightenment and the public policy decision-making process information by providing a cartography of the legitimate discourses and organisations on the topic of contact tracing digital application, this study employs a longitudinal research design. The selected time period is from the first mention of a project to implement a “Stop-Covid app” in the press the 9 of April 2020 to the announcement the 21 of October 2020 of the release of a “new enriched” version of the application renamed “AllAgainstCovid” (“TousAntiCovid”). The study is based on a qualitative content analysis of French national news media. The 12 media outlets represent a variety of political partisanship. The chosen units are either full news stories or debate articles and columns as well as articles with short quotes. The sample consists of 179 articles complemented by communication outputs: 3 reports, 5 pamphlets and position papers, and 230 twitter messages. The following intermediate bodies all took part actively in the public debates: The Institut Montaigne, Terra Nova, La Quadrature du Net, La Fing, DataRainbow, Think Tank Economie Santé, Le Club des Juristes, Le Conseil national de l’ordre des médecins, la Ligue des droits de l’homme, Génération Libre, L’Hétairie, Les collectifs Attention-stopcovid, et « Traçage numérique : « Pour éviter une seconde crise sanitaire, il faut s’en donner les moyens ».