Live data from Hacker News

France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

mamot.fr

231–240 of 399 posts

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#231
post #130

Remember when they arrested Pavel Durov? I don't buy their official reasoning. Dear European friends, our leaders are tightening the screws. If we don't make our voices heard this is only going to get worse. https://x.com/durov/status/1976420399970701543

I mean, Durov has been trying to push for Russian puppets to get elected in Romanian and Moldovan elections, by pushing to everyone (at least in Romania, he might've just posted on twitter for Moldova) that the French government is trying to interfere in the Romanian elections. I mean, it turns out, Russia was, on behalf of the candidate he was talking about... so take from that what you will.

Oh, yeah, and he calls himself DuRove now. Hats off for that one, but I hope he rots in prison for advancing the Russian agenda.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#232
post #110

so, they are basically confirming Android and Apple have their backdoors as no arrests or seizures on that matter have taken place

Yep. That’s the implication, and it’s disturbing. It also implies the US government knows - otherwise why wouldn’t they use their influence to put an end to this?

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#233
post #71

I think your devices should have government-mandated backdoors if and only if you are a public servant. I don't understand why private citizens are held to higher standards of conduct than politicians and cops.

I've been saying this for years: the more power you have the higher standard you should be held in. In most societies on the planet it's the other way around.

I've been saying this too but lately I think the fundamental notion of power is wrong. There's 2 perspectives which are 2 sides of the same coin:

---

All social relationships should be consensual.

This means based on _fully-informed_ consent which can be revoked at any time.

This already marks employment as exploitative because one side of the negotiation has more information and therefore more bargaining power. Not to mention having more money gives them more power in a myriad of other ways (can spend more on vetting you, can spend more on advertising the position than you can on advertising your skills). Just imagine if people actually had more power than corporations - you'd put up an ad listing your skills, companies would contact you with offers and you'd interview them.

Citizenship is also exploitative because you didn't willingly sign a contract exchanging money (taxes) for services (protection, healthcare, roads, ...), in most countries you can't even choose which services you want to pay for. And if you stop paying, they'll send people with guns to attack you. This sounds overdramatic (because it's so normalized) until you realize from first principles that is exactly what it is.

_If democracy is supposed to mean people rule themselves, than politicians should be servants which can be fired at any time._ In fact, in a real democracy, people would vote on important laws directly and only outsource the voting to their servants about laws which don't affect them much, or they'd simply abstain.

---

Power should come from the majority.

This should naturally be true because all real-world power comes from violence and more people can apply more violence (or threaten it, when violence is sufficiently probable to be effective, it usually does not need to be applied, the other side surrenders).

But people who are driven to power have been very good at putting together hierarchical power structures where at each level the power differential is sufficiently small that the lower side does not need to revolt against the upper side. But when you look at the ends, the power differential is huge.

Not just dictators, "presidents" or presidents but "owners" and "executives" too.

You don't truly own something you can't physically defend. When you as a worker finish a product, you literally have it in your hands. You could hand it over to a salesman and you'd both agree on how to split the money from selling it. But instead, you hand it over to the company (by proxy its owner) which sells it and gives you your monthly wage irrespective of how much the product made. The company being free to fire you or stop making the product obviously makes more money then you - it's an exploitative relationship.

But why do you hand it over? Because if you don't, they'll tell the state and it'll send people with guns to attack you.

---

Bottom line is if people had equal bargaining power ("equality"), then if they chose to temporarily give "power" to someone in one area, they'd obviously take away their "power" is some other area. Why? Because they'd know if they didn't, the more powerful person would use this power differential to get even more power, and so on, starting the runaway loop we have here now.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, or perhaps they started with companies that are smaller and easier to intimidate.

Larger companies are easier to influence than small ones, no intimidation is necessary. Protecting user privacy delivers close to 0 shareholder value, being friendly with nations wins you billions of dollars in contracts, regulatory protection, and friendly courts, it's a win-win for big companies and surveillance states to be friendly with each other.

Larger companies have more to lose if people lost faith in their platform and devices.

Monopolies are easy to influence as they don't even have to care about the optics.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#235
post #9

Is it safe to assume, then, that Google and Apple already have backdoors in their operating systems as likely requested by many governments around the world (not least of which the one from their home country)? Or is GrapheneOS the only one built securely enough to need to be leaned upon? Either way, makes Google and Apple look bad and/or incompetent and GrapheneOS look like some kind of beacon of user protection / p…

Every time I travel internationally I immediately get notifications for Android OS updates. I'm pretty sure they are for satisfying local regulations about the phone's behavior, including the topic at hand.

Anecdotal. Why wouldn't they deliver these via Play Services update? It's easy to dismiss an OS upgrade, background updates can't be really blocked.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#236
post #177
post #71

I think your devices should have government-mandated backdoors if and only if you are a public servant. I don't understand why private citizens are held to higher standards of conduct than politicians and cops.

Why would politicians and cops want to be held (actually) to a higher standard?

Who says they would? The point is the people would vote to have them held to this higher standard. They represent the people's will. They shouldnt get to choose other than their personal vote, the people choose. If they don't agree with what the people choose then they can leave politics.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#237
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember. It helped expose his lies about not traveling to russia and not collaborating with russian security services.

care to expand/provide some more info?

Durov had long claimed he was in exile from Russia and couldn’t return and that he was a UAE/French citizen. then records leaked that showed 120 border crossings from 2016-2021 and that he still held a Russian passport. One such border crossing was a flight from St Petersburg on June 18, 2020 which happens to be the same day that Telegram was unblocked in Russia… Lots and lots of smoke..

The Kyiv Independent article is a good summary.

https://kyivindependent.com/opinion-examining-telegram-found...

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#238
post #71

I think your devices should have government-mandated backdoors if and only if you are a public servant. I don't understand why private citizens are held to higher standards of conduct than politicians and cops.

> devices should have government-mandated backdoors if and only if you are a public servant This would be an intelligence bonanza. Better: mandatory, encrypted logging. Officials maintain the keys. When they leave office or are subpoenaed, they have the means to grant access. (If they can send and read their messages, they have the keys.) This is how NARA in the U.S. is supposed to work.

> This would be an intelligence bonanza.

And ideally an illustration to those in power why backdoors are never a good thing. They won't care if it's not happening to them. But if their devices are suddenly incredibly insecure due to their backdoors, they might just rethink the concept entirely.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#239
post #63

The linked article from Le Parisien (a big French billionaire-owned newspaper) is quite nuanced. It gives the police's view on narco-trafic crime, but also Graphene's take : "Criminals and traffickers also use knives." This organization, which is not a company but a foundation, emphasizes that its solution is used by ordinary people who dislike how apps and operating systems handle their data. It adds that if crimina…

How could you be so naive?

This article is as absurdly biased as it could be! Of course they provided a quoted response from GrapheneOS devs: that's the only appeal to credibility they have.

A truly responsible journalist would explain to their audience what is actually at stake, not simply spout every available position as if it were equivalent.

Re: France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors

#240

HN title: "France threatens GrapheneOS with arrests / server seizure for refusing backdoors" LQDN: "Dans ces articles, la cheffe de la section cybercriminalité du parquet de Paris – à l'origine de l'arrestation de Pavel Durov – menace également les développeurs·es de GrapheneOs. Interviewée, elle prévient qu'elle ne s'« empêchera pas de poursuivre les éditeurs, si des liens sont découverts avec une organisation crimi…

And how do you hack a single phone without a backdoor in every phone?

You use the signing keys for GrapheneOS to push an update to a single user.
Post reply on HN