GrapheneOS Moving Out of France
xcancel.com
xcancel.com
If this is true, it's a bit concerning for Ledger users. One state-mandated firmware update away from losing all your crypto?
The only way you can beat it, as a governement trying to insert a backdoor, is through use of tivoization or some other technology that clinches control during manufacturing or other centralization weak points around economies of scale that the re-programmers don't have.
And they don't give a damn about attracting eyeballs since the surveillance will be mandated by law and done legally by the book, and it will be done "for your own safety and protection against the boogieman", so that people will accept it.
As a side note, Bitcoin Core mitigates this risk with deterministic builds and multiple independent developers verifying and signing releases. But this option isn't available for Ledger as most of the firmware is closed source.
« il existe pour une certaine partie des utilisateurs une réelle légitimité dans la volonté de protéger ses échanges. L’approche est donc différente. Mais ça ne nous empêchera pas de poursuivre les éditeurs, si des liens sont découverts avec une organisation criminelle et qu’ils ne coopèrent pas avec la justice. »
Charitably, GrapheneOS are not in fact a front for organized crime, but merely paranoid, assuming that the news coverage is laying the groundwork for prosecution on trumped-up charges. Notably, there doesn't appear to have been direct communication from law enforcement yet.
The difference between someone being paranoid and someone being right, is time.
Of course if your organization have connections to a criminal organization, you are going to be in trouble. Same thing for refusing to cooperate with law enforcement, this is not some abstract thing, it is about following the law, for example relating to evidence tampering or search warrants.
I don't think France is anything special in that regard.
Open source developers have been given jail sentences in the last months.
If you're a broke open source developer - even if you believe under the law you're not doing anything wrong - would you want to be exposed to law enforcement harassment (lawfare) for no reason?
Also: chat control.
The result is a less-than-optimal network that requires routing communications through a ground station (where it can be intercepted) even when it's technically feasible (and optimal) to use point-to-point communications.
The resulting technical solutions (at least) double the bandwidth and processing required by the network, and bandwidth/processing are critical resources for communications satellites. These requirements can make or break the economic feasibility of a proposed system.
Meta, Microsoft, and Google's extensive user tracking beg to differ.
Meta, Microsoft, Google, & Apple have a profit motive for scooping up everything they can.
Every government in the world wants to do the same scooping, but their motive is "security."
These are not separate activities either. Governments are mandating the collection by corporations, so they can use that channel for their own purposes.
In practice, encrypted messaging, and more broadly the unregulated, anonymous nature of the internet is THE technology that enables this. Ukrainian refugees are essentially indistinguishable in practice from Russian operatives and pose a very real security risk. The loss of the US as a reliable ally, which in practice is the new reality, is felt here in a very real way.
I think this point is largely missed by hacker news. I am legitimately afraid that Russia might assassinate elected leaders and invade, and embroil my own country in a war that might lead to my death. And to be honest my worries are a bit overblown in my particular case, it is very unrealistic that this will happen to my particular country, but if I were to live in Poland they wouldn't be.
I raise this point in response to your quotation marks around "security". European countries have very real, and very pressing security concerns.
It's easy to justify snooping. The issue (for me) is when the snooping unjustifiably infringes on my personal privacy. Governments will argue that they don't know that I'm not a threat, so they must surveil me. Unfortunately, those who are doing the surveilling can also be a threat to the people, even when the people are behaving completely in compliance with the law. You need only look at some of the recent revelations in the US press for examples.
Knowledge is power, and power corrupts.
How? Governments have the monopoly on violence through their control of the police and military, and corporations bribe the governments in power to do their bidding and also control the media apparatus via which the voting population makes their democratic decisions, so you get this corrupt symbiotic relationship between the first and second estate (the government and wealthy elite private sector) to keep the third estate (common population) oppressed.
So how do you actually coordinate hundreds of millions of people towards a single goal to "fight" against and apparatus of oppression with an order of magnitude more kinetic strike, intelligence gathering and propaganda capabilities than the common folk?
People keep fantasizing about the French revolution and guillotines, but King Louis XVI didn't have Air Force One, doomsday bunkers in New Zeeland, AC-130s, Predator, Reaper and Anduril drones to protect him. The force disparity between the ruling elite and peasantry is now like that meme of hydrogen bomb versus coughing baby.
Old ways that seemed to be working, like democratic elections? I don't think so. Not anymore.
Would surprise me if they weren't moving out of France entirely.
Out of the frying pan, into the fire?
You know, I live in Poland, where up to 1989 when you were captured by police (which was called militia back then) they would beat the shit out of you or nag your family unless you incriminate yourself. And these were not democratic values. Basically the ruling system was authoritarian at that time. And I can see some similarities here between Poland pre 1989 and France nowadays.
-- EDIT --
Chat Control which was accepted by France is also really good connection to those times when your packages were being opened in the post office, if you were suspected by the one-party government. Also there was a time that all the phone calls were eavesdropped by security service.
In theory. In practice there's a case where a defendant is being held in contempt (jailed) for years now, for refusing to provide her encryption passwords. At that point both the 5th and the idea of contempt are busted.
Link to story?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13629728
And he was freed after about 4 years.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/man-who-refused-...
> In practice there's a case where a defendant is being held in contempt (jailed) for years now
They are not still being held due to contempt, they were released. Now if he was convicted then thats different and the correct reason to be imprisoned.
> she
It was not a she.
The ruling showed that you can only be held for 18 months in the US for refusal. They would need to actually charge them with a crime if the government wanted more than that.