The newspaper article referenced contains insinuation (linking GrapheneOS to the darkweb, criminal gangs etc), and unnamed sources quoting a police investigation.
But that sort of thing sells newspapers. There didn't appear to be anything about the French state taking specific action (eg passing a law) against Graphene.
Can confirm, this is nothing but more scaremongering from right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, both owned by right-wing oligarchs (Dassault and Arnault respectively) trying to fuel this climate of fear to further their economic interests by getting a right-wing demagogue elected. Both papers are caught lying all the time, like Fox News. You shouldn't be taking this seriously.
What you should take seriously though, is this amping up of right-wing populist rhetoric, manufacturing a mass hysteria about crime (when it's at its lowest point in decades) that is then used to justify increasingly authoritarian policies.
Keep in mind, until the "liberals" create a proper state that isn't easily capitulated to the far right fear, the risk of these rags becoming defacto, and these threats becoming policy, like they did in America, it's a legitimate threat.
Don't get trapped by right or left they are all owned by oligarchs trying to push or pull the public towards some agenda that benefits them, sometimes other oligarchs but rarely you.
The crime is down stat is a political stat that doesn't tell you are safer. It could mean police are not going after small crimes or people just stop reporting them or they are classified differently. It could say money spent on law enforcement is working and more is needed. On the other hand it could say community outreach and educational coapaigns are working. Many previous crimes reported thats changing with a more racially diverse force.
Is it just a coincidence that the recent action against archive.today and all its other TLDs is also based out of France? It also at least tangentially involves state action against an element outside of state control, i.e., being able to keep records out of the regime memory hole.
I did not follow up with whether there was any kind of understanding or resolution of what was going on with the Archive situation, but it seems oddly coincidental that these types of actions would be going on effectively simultaneously.
We weren't given a chance to see what was being claimed and properly respond to it. Our response at the end of the article was to this prompt, which was in the first and only email we received, in English:
> I am preparing an article on the use of your secure personal data phone solution by drug traffickers and other criminals. Have you ever been contacted by the police?
The claims in the main story strongly indicate they're not talking about GrapheneOS itself but rather companies selling closed source forks of it with significant modifications. They refer to features which don't exist in GrapheneOS. Supposedly GrapheneOS which is freely available from https://grapheneos.org/install/web and https://grapheneos.org/releases with sources on GitHub is distributed on the "dark web" and promoted via unlisted YouTube videos. They're clearly conflating products which market themselves by saying they're using GrapheneOS with the upstream project those are forked from. These are largely sketchy products and we regularly have to deal with them infringing on our copyright and trademarks.
One of these companies marketing products claiming to use GrapheneOS, ANOM, turned out to be a company run by the FBI as a sting operation which was hiring criminals to sell phones to other criminals. ANOM told people what they were getting was GrapheneOS when it was actually a mix of GrapheneOS and LineageOS code. The FBI was broadly facilitating crime in Europe by providing them devices they considered secure and safe to use while disregarding most of it to avoid exposing their operation. They were also misusing our brand and harming our reputation us through this. A lot of the claimed criminal usage was directly engineered by the FBI. A detailed podcast episode on this:
It says that if we don't cooperate, they'll take similar actions against us they did against 2 named secure phone companies. Those actions were taking over their servers and criminal charges. It's clear what they want is a backdoor to have access to devices they're unable to exploit due to the advanced exploit protections. They're threatening that if this is not provided, they'll go after us as they did companies they said were collaborating with criminals. They likely consider providing freely available open source software which anyone can use for any purpose to be collaborating with criminals.
The main result will be OVH losing our business to a Toronto colocation provider for important non-static content (discussion forum, email, Matrix, Mastodon, attestation service), Vultr (American) for our anycast DNS + exotic webserver locations, Netcup (German) and perhaps another 1-2 companies for NA/EU web servers where Vultr is extremely overpriced due to double the costs for the same specs and metered bandwidth (it's great for exotic locations and BGP support for our anycast though).
There's another article here, but the paywall isn't bypassed by archive sites (we've read it though):
There's no single mastermind. This current wave of authoritarianism around the world is a consequence of not designing the Internet with democratic principles in mind. Online content discovery and moderation mechanisms are centralized and authoritarian in nature. And since most communication nowadays happens on the Internet on large platforms with millions of users (this is especially true after smartphones and social media were invented), the structure of human society in the real world is mirroring the Internet.
This can be solved, though. We have to move moderation and ranking mechanisms to the client-side, especially for search engines and social media. Each person should be able to decide what they post and see, but not what anyone else posts or sees.
Yeah well there is definitely something going on, a coordinated effort to condemn GrapheneOS with faint praise (and outright scare-mongering). Here I have posted a video url I'd downloaded and watched a few days ago. It's TTS slop narration, but it makes an attempt to characterize GrapheneOS as a 'double-edged sword', because, you know, criminals. Just like the hatchet job from France.
'GrapheneOS Update 2025 Privacy Savior or Hacker’s Paradise'
I get all my utube from the bash-prompt (and never have to deal with algorithm or see who is who and what else is there), so I don't know who posted this video to YouTube, but maybe there's more?
This could be a case study in an amateur low-grade half-ass influence operation.
On the other hand, it could simply be a grudge, a coordinated personal attack on the lead dev.
There are a slew of other videos by YouTube personalities who, at various times, seem to be disparaging the guy, including a very upset Grossman (right-to-repair guy).
Or hey, maybe it's just coincidence. C'est la vie!
I don't think it's coordinated. The animosity and competition between companies and governments couldn't possibly get them to agree on anything of this scale.
Rather, Occam's razor suggests that their interests simply align against individual privacy.
Company executives are plutomaniacs, and companies can't access and exploit your data if you want to keep it private. Politicians are megalomaniacs, highly insecure and defensive of their position, and governments can't monitor your thoughts and activities if you want to keep them private; they take comfort in knowing that you are a good and subservient citizen.
Many decades ago people in governments and companies understood that they can accomplish their goals much easier if they cooperate, which is why lobbying is a legal multi-billion-dollar industry, why we see CEOs in politics, and so on. The world of 1984 is a reality; it's just that our leash is long enough and the carrot enticing enough for us to care about it.
Don't fall into this reductionist thinking, there is no secret cabal behind it. It's not even coordinated.
This wave of authoritarianism is simply the result of well-funded right-wing populists taking advantage of an economically tough situation for the masses, after decades of neoliberalist austerity and deregulation. They're using fear and hate to further the goals of their wealthy patrons: deregulating the economy further. Mass surveillance comes for free with these people, it's purely a consequence of focusing the entire public discourse on perceived crime levels and fear of foreigners.
The two articles attacking GrapheneOS come from right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, who make their bread and butter painting a bleak picture of the country, when crime levels are at an all-times low. QED
GrapheneOS is a project with really good intentions, and we should definitely give them credit.
But here’s the thing: criminals end up exploiting tech like this, and that makes the project an easy target for law enforcement. We’ve seen the exact same thing happen with crypto.
We need to just accept that any technology designed for security and privacy is always going to be a double-edged sword.
Another empire throwing a tantrum because it believes itself to be bigger than its citizenry. Lot of that going around lately, but still no real state actors seemingly willing to give sanctuary to these sorts of security and privacy projects beyond Switzerland, and even they seem keen on weakening protections.
If I had Android, I’d absolutely be using GrapheneOS.
Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, but just for a few. Remember the French goverment banning encryption in the 90's.
The French elite hates science and math because it was modernly developed by the Brits, and they love to put Arts/Humanities bullshitters like Derrida on top as if they mattered something over Francis Bacon and Newton. Just watch any TF1 talk show and you'll understand what I mean. Or, well, any state supported Homeopathy based "pills" (which is mostly snake oil being sold as sugar). Or the Sokal affair...
> > I am preparing an article on the use of your secure personal data phone solution by drug traffickers and other criminals.
I think GrapheneOS needs a really good PR expert volunteer, or funding to pay for a non-volunteer.
My non-PR-expert guesses are... If the journalist is in bad faith or flaky, that might need to be handled. But if the journalist is in good faith, this might be an opportunity, to promote GrapheneOS and/or to start to head off adverse gov't actions there.
(GrapheneOS does some great technical work, and has given me what seems to be a more respectful and trustworthy smartphone than I could get from Apple or Google. Right now, I'd think many countries in Europe and elsewhere should be looking at something like GrapheneOS as a possible interim measure on their way to greater digital sovereignty. I understand that the French people especially value liberty.)
Always impressed by GrapheneOS social media painstakingly dealing with these trolls. For those without time the link they post to a 3rd party comparison of Android based OSes is very enlightening:
That's a hell of an endorsement by the French govt. I use GOS as a daily driver and it's fantastic - it's what android was supposed to be before it enshittified. It's refreshing to feel like i control my smart phone again and not the other way around.
It's funny. It just struck me that the EU is uniquely well positioned to develop an alternative to Android and iOS.
Start with one of the open source projects - I guess an Android derivative, sans all the Google stuff. Give them funding, maybe regulate (that always helps).
Then mandate that within X years, various key apps must provide for this system - things like bank apps, state admin apps etc. In high likelihood, development would be close enough to Android that it would not be a crazy high burden - and anyway, it seems most people use cross platform frameworks.
EU could regulate, or influence via ownership, privacy controls better tailored to European tastes.
That would give the EU a dose of digital sovereignty without doing much, and ensuring some degree of usability.
It's a shame that instead GrapheneOS seems to get sued.
28 comments
[ 175 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadBut that sort of thing sells newspapers. There didn't appear to be anything about the French state taking specific action (eg passing a law) against Graphene.
What you should take seriously though, is this amping up of right-wing populist rhetoric, manufacturing a mass hysteria about crime (when it's at its lowest point in decades) that is then used to justify increasingly authoritarian policies.
It's just not today, but tomorrow.
The crime is down stat is a political stat that doesn't tell you are safer. It could mean police are not going after small crimes or people just stop reporting them or they are classified differently. It could say money spent on law enforcement is working and more is needed. On the other hand it could say community outreach and educational coapaigns are working. Many previous crimes reported thats changing with a more racially diverse force.
It tells you whatever you want to believe.
I did not follow up with whether there was any kind of understanding or resolution of what was going on with the Archive situation, but it seems oddly coincidental that these types of actions would be going on effectively simultaneously.
> I am preparing an article on the use of your secure personal data phone solution by drug traffickers and other criminals. Have you ever been contacted by the police?
The claims in the main story strongly indicate they're not talking about GrapheneOS itself but rather companies selling closed source forks of it with significant modifications. They refer to features which don't exist in GrapheneOS. Supposedly GrapheneOS which is freely available from https://grapheneos.org/install/web and https://grapheneos.org/releases with sources on GitHub is distributed on the "dark web" and promoted via unlisted YouTube videos. They're clearly conflating products which market themselves by saying they're using GrapheneOS with the upstream project those are forked from. These are largely sketchy products and we regularly have to deal with them infringing on our copyright and trademarks.
One of these companies marketing products claiming to use GrapheneOS, ANOM, turned out to be a company run by the FBI as a sting operation which was hiring criminals to sell phones to other criminals. ANOM told people what they were getting was GrapheneOS when it was actually a mix of GrapheneOS and LineageOS code. The FBI was broadly facilitating crime in Europe by providing them devices they considered secure and safe to use while disregarding most of it to avoid exposing their operation. They were also misusing our brand and harming our reputation us through this. A lot of the claimed criminal usage was directly engineered by the FBI. A detailed podcast episode on this:
https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/146/
There's also this second article from the same paper containing the explicit threat referred to in our posts:
https://archive.is/UrlvK
It says that if we don't cooperate, they'll take similar actions against us they did against 2 named secure phone companies. Those actions were taking over their servers and criminal charges. It's clear what they want is a backdoor to have access to devices they're unable to exploit due to the advanced exploit protections. They're threatening that if this is not provided, they'll go after us as they did companies they said were collaborating with criminals. They likely consider providing freely available open source software which anyone can use for any purpose to be collaborating with criminals.
The main result will be OVH losing our business to a Toronto colocation provider for important non-static content (discussion forum, email, Matrix, Mastodon, attestation service), Vultr (American) for our anycast DNS + exotic webserver locations, Netcup (German) and perhaps another 1-2 companies for NA/EU web servers where Vultr is extremely overpriced due to double the costs for the same specs and metered bandwidth (it's great for exotic locations and BGP support for our anycast though).
There's another article here, but the paywall isn't bypassed by archive sites (we've read it though):
https://archive.is/FBc1U
Unfortunately we still don't know what it is or what its goals are.
This can be solved, though. We have to move moderation and ranking mechanisms to the client-side, especially for search engines and social media. Each person should be able to decide what they post and see, but not what anyone else posts or sees.
'GrapheneOS Update 2025 Privacy Savior or Hacker’s Paradise'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgi6bJy-qo
I get all my utube from the bash-prompt (and never have to deal with algorithm or see who is who and what else is there), so I don't know who posted this video to YouTube, but maybe there's more?
This could be a case study in an amateur low-grade half-ass influence operation.
On the other hand, it could simply be a grudge, a coordinated personal attack on the lead dev.
There are a slew of other videos by YouTube personalities who, at various times, seem to be disparaging the guy, including a very upset Grossman (right-to-repair guy).
Or hey, maybe it's just coincidence. C'est la vie!
Rather, Occam's razor suggests that their interests simply align against individual privacy.
Company executives are plutomaniacs, and companies can't access and exploit your data if you want to keep it private. Politicians are megalomaniacs, highly insecure and defensive of their position, and governments can't monitor your thoughts and activities if you want to keep them private; they take comfort in knowing that you are a good and subservient citizen.
Many decades ago people in governments and companies understood that they can accomplish their goals much easier if they cooperate, which is why lobbying is a legal multi-billion-dollar industry, why we see CEOs in politics, and so on. The world of 1984 is a reality; it's just that our leash is long enough and the carrot enticing enough for us to care about it.
This wave of authoritarianism is simply the result of well-funded right-wing populists taking advantage of an economically tough situation for the masses, after decades of neoliberalist austerity and deregulation. They're using fear and hate to further the goals of their wealthy patrons: deregulating the economy further. Mass surveillance comes for free with these people, it's purely a consequence of focusing the entire public discourse on perceived crime levels and fear of foreigners.
The two articles attacking GrapheneOS come from right-wing rags: Le Figaro and Le Parisien, who make their bread and butter painting a bleak picture of the country, when crime levels are at an all-times low. QED
But here’s the thing: criminals end up exploiting tech like this, and that makes the project an easy target for law enforcement. We’ve seen the exact same thing happen with crypto.
We need to just accept that any technology designed for security and privacy is always going to be a double-edged sword.
If I had Android, I’d absolutely be using GrapheneOS.
Of course they will hate it if a particular OS and phone combination make this impossible.
I can go on and on...
I think GrapheneOS needs a really good PR expert volunteer, or funding to pay for a non-volunteer.
My non-PR-expert guesses are... If the journalist is in bad faith or flaky, that might need to be handled. But if the journalist is in good faith, this might be an opportunity, to promote GrapheneOS and/or to start to head off adverse gov't actions there.
(GrapheneOS does some great technical work, and has given me what seems to be a more respectful and trustworthy smartphone than I could get from Apple or Google. Right now, I'd think many countries in Europe and elsewhere should be looking at something like GrapheneOS as a possible interim measure on their way to greater digital sovereignty. I understand that the French people especially value liberty.)
Veracrypt stopped development in France and moved TLD's to .jp (though they also physically moved).
https://eylenburg.github.io/android_comparison.htm
Start with one of the open source projects - I guess an Android derivative, sans all the Google stuff. Give them funding, maybe regulate (that always helps).
Then mandate that within X years, various key apps must provide for this system - things like bank apps, state admin apps etc. In high likelihood, development would be close enough to Android that it would not be a crazy high burden - and anyway, it seems most people use cross platform frameworks.
EU could regulate, or influence via ownership, privacy controls better tailored to European tastes.
That would give the EU a dose of digital sovereignty without doing much, and ensuring some degree of usability.
It's a shame that instead GrapheneOS seems to get sued.