There’s been some posts about Graphene leaving france and accusing the government of targeting them.
This isn’t happening. What happened is that le parisien posted an article that presents what french law enforcement think of grapheneOS, which is obviously mostly crap, then present part of graphene’s respone, which does in fact include their references to human rights organizations, large tech companies and others using GrapheneOS, unlike what grapheneOS claims. The main flaw with the article is the fact that the author takes what the french law enforcement says at face value, which is not a good move.
If you haven’t been following this you may be wondering how this was extrapolated into the government targeting them. Well, it’s because government owned news sites also reported on this. This is because le parisien’s article got regurgitated by a bunch of other news sites looking for an easy article to get ad revenue from, normal news site behavior. The government news sites are fully editorially independent from the government, which the GrapheneOS lead should know, since that’s how the canadian CBC works.
For chat control, that measure isn’t supported by the majority of french meps, just the (massively unpopular) head of state and his minority government. No similar law has been passed nationally, in fact, a law that guarantees privacy rights is making it’s way through the legislature (tuta article). If chat control passes, it affects several of the countries (germany and belgium, afaik) they moved to as well, anyways.
Graphene’s announcement also disparages the other two big privacy roms, both based in france, which is odd and makes me personally think this may have more to do with the visible hatred the project lead has for those projects.
Please tell me what you think, and if I missed anything important, because it really seems like a big nothing-burger to me.


Why do I keep hearing about drama around graphene?
i think i can answer this
personally, when i first encountered graphene’s radical statements about the terrible security landscape we’re all subjected to, i reacted quite negatively & assumed they were crazy.
then i actually check the technical details of their claims, and fuck me it turns out to be SCARILY correct.
most people don’t actually bother with the second part. and you end up with a classic “shoot the messenger” scenario, where the bearer of bad news is equated with the bad news itself & punished by the mob (because they feel it’s easier than actually facing the uncomfortable reality of the bad news).
that scenario can only play out for so long before the messenger gets sick of being shot every day & reacts badly to the crowd. then the crowd points at their poor reaction & uses it as further “evidence” against their character.