lemmy - Link to source

GrapheneOS Foundation Comments On FBI Helping Criminals In Collaboration With European Countries

Please listen to this podcast about ANOM:

darknetdiaries.com/transcript/…

The FBI ran a sting operation in Europe where they created their own 'secure' phone and messaging platform. Their OS used portions of our code and was heavily marketed as being GrapheneOS or based on GrapheneOS.

Through this operation, the FBI provided criminals in Europe with a communication network they heavily trusted. It gave them much more confidence to coordinate and commit crimes. The vast majority of this crime was ignored for years to avoid exposing ANOM as being a honey pot.

In cooperation with many European governments, the FBI heavily encouraged and facilitated organized crime in Europe. US and European governments facilitated drug trafficking, human trafficking, murders, rape, kidnapping and much more for years while claiming it was GrapheneOS.

It's an outrageous infringement on the GrapheneOS copyright and trademarks. US and European governments did massive harm to the GrapheneOS project through doing this. They placed us in very real danger of violence from organized crime by selling fake GrapheneOS devices to them.

GrapheneOS building technology to protect privacy and security is completely legal. Our work is strongly protected by Canadian, European and American laws. A minuscule portion of our userbase are criminals and the claims being made by the French government about that are lies.

It's very likely a lot of the crime facilitated by ANOM wouldn't have happened without these governments providing criminals with a communications network they believed was completely secure. The way they wrapped it up doesn't absolve them of what they facilitated for years.

France's government and law enforcement wants you to believe GrapheneOS and Signal are somehow responsible for crime. French law enforcement operates with impunity and has extraordinarily levels of corruption and criminal behavior. They're the ones committing and enabling crime.

GrapheneOS (@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social)

GrapheneOS (GrapheneOS Mastodon)
#grapheneos
in reply to artyom

lemmy - Link to source

Metr0pl3X

Based on the investigation done into it, it had a small subset of GrapheneOS changes applied and they falsely advertised it as GrapheneOS. They likely took some of the changes in order to mislead people into believing they were given a variant of GrapheneOS. It didn't use the GrapheneOS branding though. They used the already well established name and reputation of GrapheneOS to appeal to those it was being sold to.

vice.com/en/article/anom-phone…


We Got the Phone the FBI Secretly Sold to Criminals

'Anom’ phones used in an FBI honeypot are mysteriously showing up on the secondary market. We bought one.
Joseph Cox (VICE)
in reply to Metr0pl3X

piefed - Link to source

artyom

they falsely advertised it as GrapheneOS


From your article:

When booting up the phone, it displays a logo for an operating system called “ArcaneOS.” Very little information is publicly available on ArcaneOS. It’s this detail that has helped lead several people who have ended up with Anom phones to realize something was unusual about their device.

It didn't use the GrapheneOS branding though.


Then it's not copyright or trademark infringement

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to artyom

lemmy - Link to source

Metr0pl3X

Doesn't matter how it was branded on the device, what matters for the infringement is how it was sold, we have information that they were being sold AS GrapheneOS using our trademark.

From the International Trademark Association

Use of well-known trademarks such as in comparison lists used by marketers of imitations, was not fair use because it gave the marketers an unlawful comparative advertising advantage by allowing them to trade off the reputation of the well-known marks. (EU)


Our name being used alongside and for the promotion of these products infringes our Trademark outside of fair use.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Metr0pl3X

lemmy - Link to source

trilobite

I can see that if this were verified and true, with hard evidence provided, a big investigative news agency like The Guardian, would get their teeth of this and stick it on their headline pages. I think there is a lot of crap and conspiracy theories on the Internet and I still believe in true investigative jounalism. As a society, we are changing our habits, trusting social media rather that true journalism. This is why people like the orange man in the US and his pals in Israel an Russia are f***ing up the world. We are all falling for it ...
in reply to bloubz

lemmy - Link to source

vas

I've tried just now, and I can't confirm any of your claims. Neither about "massively funded", nor about being funded at all.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Fr… (no mentions of being funded by CIA, no mentions of Signal)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_F… (no mentions of CIA, no mentions of Radio Free Asia)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(… (no mentions of CIA, no mentions of Radio Free Asia)

American non-profit organization

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to vas

lemmy - Link to source

bloubz

Radio Free Asia and other programs of Radio Liberty and such were lead by the propaganda agency called United States Agency for Global Media (which Trump recently defunded). It also supervised the Open Technology Fund (you can at the very least read on the wiki page of the OTF that it funded Signal). It is not a state secret that these are CIA programs. I can give you sources if needed when I'm at home. I'm pretty sure all of this was shown on their respective wikipedia pages but again, wikipedia is just an example for western and well accepted source
in reply to XeroxCool

lemmy - Link to source

Metr0pl3X

France back in 2023 targeted Signal (discovered through a leaked memo) and it's service saying it wasn't secure to push ministers and others to French solution Olvid.

The same year French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said that he would like to force encrypted messaging services to introduce 'backdoors' to make them available to authorities. Mirroring the recent threat from Johanna Brousse toward GrapheneOS:

"These hitherto inviolate devices, which protect communications and which do not share data on servers, are a new challenge that the cyber prosecutor's office intends to take on"

lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2…

In both cases it is likely realistically focused on pushing users to France based alternatives. In this case the EU funded murena /e/OS.

ngi.eu/impact-stories/e-os-pro…


Encryption 'backdoors,' an unenforceable yet recurring political objective

Florian Reynaud (Le Monde)
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to KindnessInfinity

piefed - Link to source

MalReynolds

While I use gOS and have a high respect for their technical skills and exemplary ethics and recognize the very real need for it, and the great work they've done upstreaming security for the greater android community, but my god there's a lot of drama associated, both internally and externally. They would be far better served with a calm and professional press presence. I have their mastodon feed in my RSS and at least monthly there's a flood of rant and screed about some press coverage or someone using their (GPL I think) stuff. Generally speaking they have a valid point in there, but the tone is off, a bit of taking the piss (humour) would go a long way.

Sometimes I fear they will implode and we'll lose this oh so necessary project.

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