GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS • Hacker News Board

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#391

Post by josephg » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:59 PM UTC

abc123abc123 wrote: post #367

dijit wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thought the culture was “free speech” if you’re denied at the border for expressing speech online at some historic point (non-violent) then how can “respecting the culture” work? When I am in Saudi Arabia, I don’t wear shorts out of respect for their culture; but they don’t go through my instagram looking for pictures of me in shorts.

[flagged]

> As for the US, probably 0.000001% or so had sad experiences at the border.

Heh it’s a lot more than that. About 1/3rd of my Australian friends have a story to tell about unfortunate US border crossing experiences. I personally know two (white) people who were denied entry at the border - in both cases for allegedly ridiculous reasons.

My partner was arrested at the beach once in the US. The police wanted her to narc on someone she was travelling with and she refused. (The case was thrown out of court by a furious judge, but it was a whole thing).

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#392

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC

diordiderot wrote: post #355

ben_w wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered doing the same in reverse? Because sure, if you look at the right parts of the US, you can find zero homicide rate due to there not being any residents. You can also do this in Europe. It tells you nothing. What may give you a hint about relative safety is that the UK police don't bother with being regularly equipped with firearms, because they don't need to be .

Side note, UK police harass people for 'non-crime hate incidents' and put people on terror lists for being critical of protected ideologies. Judges give longer sentences for mean tweets than hoarding child pornography or months long torture and rape of children. More euros die of heat stroke than Americans die from gun violence. Edit: NHS waitlists are double digit months to years. You have one of the worst birthing…

Can you elaborate on "being critical of protected ideologies", what does that mean in concrete terms?

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#393

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:12 PM UTC

diordiderot wrote: post #348

ben_w wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered doing the same in reverse? Because sure, if you look at the right parts of the US, you can find zero homicide rate due to there not being any residents. You can also do this in Europe. It tells you nothing. What may give you a hint about relative safety is that the UK police don't bother with being regularly equipped with firearms, because they don't need to be .

> if you look at the right parts of the US No, I’m saying almost the opposite. Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country. There are large, fully developed, highly populated parts of the US where you are very safe. Often moreso than places people assume are “safer”…

> Crime in the US is highly concentrated. A large share is committed by relatively small groups, in specific places, and follows a power-law pattern rather than being evenly spread across the country.

Do you think crime in Europe is evenly spread across the whole continent? Or even that it's a constant rate within any geographical division of any nation in Europe?

Small groups doing crimes mostly to each other is not a novel thing unique to the USA. The (approximately) power-law relation is the same in places where stats exist to study the question: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40163-017-0069-x/...

I used to live in the UK, and in my 35 years there I was victimised a total of twice, one of which was an unattended bike left outdoors overnight; the safe middle-class south of Havant just wasn't targeted by roving gangs from the "rough" estate of Leigh Park in north Havant, even though that was absolutely walking distance, and a short walk at that.

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#394

Post by jadamson » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

lwhi wrote: post #314

jadamson wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You said one officer. There were four in attendance. You're saying that allegations of two-tier policing are far-right disinformation. In fact, it is official policy, and the IPCC document leaves no room for interpretation on this. Another user brought up Jean Charles de Menezes, a man killed in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings after being misidentified as a terror threat that should not be allowed on the tube. Ir…

> You're saying that allegations of two-tier policing are far-right disinformation. No. I am saying that this one event is being used as ammunition by racist organisations to further their aims. One officer was filmed on body cam arresting Henry Nowak. I am referring to him. I am utterly disgusted by the number of frankly racist people using this as a reason to prevent our society being celebrated for its diversity.…

> I am saying that this one event is being used as ammunition by racist organisations to further their aims.

That much follows as sure as night follows day. I'm reminded of the riots after the police killing of Mark Duggan [1]. Those who understood themselves to be on the receiving end of policed mistreatment latched on to it, using it as an excuse to loot and start fires, regardless of the fact that Duggan was lawfully killed on his way back from purchasing an illegal firearm - a weapon that he, ironically, intended to use to kill another black man.

There's an outside chance you're correct that the police's treatment of Nowak was simply incompetence, but paired with the explicit policy to treat racial groups differently to one another, that is not how it will be perceived. Add to that the fact that his murderer falsely accused him of racism to obscure the fact he'd just fatally stabbed the man, and the racial dynamic is undeniable.

That dynamic concretely exists. It exists on paper, in the mind of Nowak's killer, and in the minds of those protesting. The question then is how to defuse it. If you think immigration/diversity are positives (and I agree that they can be, with some caveats), my suggestion would be that you should be as against the IPCC's notion of "racial equity" as I am, even if only because the current situation was bound to happen regardless of any p=0.01 direct line between the IPCC document and this particular incident.

In other words: even if you were right, it would barely matter. Mark Duggan has rarely been brought up as an example of injustice since the facts of the case were fully elucidated, but that IPCC document, and others like it [2], will be an endless source of grief.

> It's wrong to use this as an example of why immigration is bad for society.

The top comment mentioned "two-tier justice" and we have argued from there. You are the only person to even use the words "immigration" or "diversity" until now.

I would like to think that we can have immigration and diversity without an IPCC that says police shouldn't treat people equally, or a sentencing council that thinks provision of PSRs should be based on ethnicity, or vetting panels that that allow ineligible applicants to join the police force.

Am I wrong? Let me know and I'll update my opinions accordingly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Mark_Duggan

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2gn9zqkp9o

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#395

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #384

ben_w wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my salary is 150k and I spend 5k that's 3.3%. > If my salary is 60k that same 5k is 8.3%. So? The US federal taxes are not a constant dollar amount. Someone who earns $60k pays $5,020, someone who earns $150k pays $24,734, from the first tax calculator I found. Same idea in the UK. > So when I am talking about "cost" I mean hours of labor. It costs Americans fewer hours of labor to pay for their healthcare. This…

My argument is our basic NHS level care costs us less labor to reach and that the rest of that spend is a luxury on nicer facilities, equipment, rooms, food, nurses and other personal which we are happy to spend because it's a luxury we have that only the rich in the UK can afford while in the US at least the middle class can reach that level. We also classify these costs as healthcare when you might classify them in…

"We have hospital care!"

"Yeah, well we have worse care, but nicer waiting rooms, so take that!"

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#396

Post by Hizonner » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:15 PM UTC

dmitrygr wrote: post #356

akimbostrawman wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they can try, so far GrapheneOS has been the only mobile OS immune to them.

I have really, really, really bad news for you about any modern SoC, including all those by Qualcomm. Their ROM private keys are widely available to the three letter agencies. Your OS, while cute, provides no protection at all to anyone who has physical access. Secure boot root keys give away the whole kingdom

There are no "ROM private keys" in Qualcomm or most other chips. The root of trust is fused in by the OEM. Apparently the exception is Apple.

They would have to individually steal keys from every OEM, in GraphenOS' case meaning Google. Then they'd have to do the right dance to fake the right stuff to satisfy the Secure Element(TM) and get it to let them use the data encryption keys. Which, by the way, I believe requires forking over a hash that may vary among individual phones; you have to know which version of the appropriate stage you want to fake.

... and you'll excuse me if I'm skeptical of your confident statements about what TLAs do or don't have access to, especially when you start talking about keys that don't exist.

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#397

Post by josephg » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:16 PM UTC

Hizonner wrote: post #373

rvnx wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It's not your role to decide or interfere in the politics of other countries where you are not a permanent resident. Think of it like you being a guest. Well, that's a pretty damned repulsive view. Countries, governments, whatever, don't have a right to just do whatever they want to their citizens without anybody else noticing. All individuals morally outrank all institutions.

As a counterpoint: I lived in Melbourne, Australia during the pandemic. We were going for elimination. We tried some of the world’s strictest lockdown laws.

Apparently there were protests in NY of all places on our behalf. I don’t know what they were hoping would happen - would the state of NY ask our state to change our laws for them? How bizarre. Our local policies are up to us, thanks.

Surely NY had other things to worry about at the time? The news we were hearing of ambulances in NY queueing outside overpacked hospitals… though I suppose the media there was saying equally scary things about life in Melbourne.

Our lockdowns didn’t work, but we loved our state premier for trying. He was so popular that the following election, the other political parties didn’t really bother to show up. The opinion of New Yorkers was against the will of most locals here. It was sweet to protest for us. But it had very weird vibes.

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#398

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

Arch-TK wrote: post #182

Aldipower wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this satire?

No, just the UK. I actually think it might be worse. You need to be able to hand over encryption keys too. Claiming to not know them is also not allowed, whether you actually know them or not. I am reasonably convinced that if you wipe the key slots on an encrypted drive but leave encrypted blocks around, they might be able to argue that you are obligates to store all the block keys for such an occasion. So using any…

Did that happen? Did someone to go jail for not decrypting a TLS connection or a random data block?

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#399

Post by trumpdong » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:19 PM UTC

mjmas wrote: post #265

andrepd wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only hit I get for "non-crime cybersecurity incident" is this very thread. Would you care to elaborate what you mean?

I think it is a play on "non-crime hate incident".

That's when the police go to your door and go "bro, knock it off before it starts being a crime" right?

Probably more effective than the US system where they wait until it's actually a crime, then charge you.

Re: GrapheneOS user reported to authorities for using GrapheneOS

#400

Post by Hizonner » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 2:21 PM UTC

gizajob wrote: post #228

JdeBP wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having a written constitution is not the same as not having rights in everyday practice.

This confuses so many people - the Uk has a series of constitutions and a very strong and historical legal basis for rights. It’s not strictly codified in one purposely written document but it does exist. And it’s a mistake to say if there’s no constitution then you have no fundamental rights. The UKs system is a hodgepodge but so is having a written constitution that can be regularly amended or otherwise ignored.

The problem with that view is that when the "strong legal basis" is not codified, and codified in a way that nonspecialists can at least vaguely identify and understand, it gets a lot easier to get away with ignoring it. Which the UK has been going hog wild doing in the last 20 years or so.

I am not saying the US is better in practice. The bottom line is that authority worshippers will take whatever liberties they can get away with in any system.