Please listen to this podcast about ANOM:

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/146/

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.

  • Metr0pl3X@lemmy.mlM
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    7 days ago

    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.

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/anom-phone-arcaneos-fbi-backdoor/#%3A~%3Atext=Android+operating+system-%2Cgrapheneos%2C-%2C+also+provided+Motherboard

    • artyom@piefed.social
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      7 days ago

      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

      • Metr0pl3X@lemmy.mlM
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        7 days ago

        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.

        • vas@lemmy.ml
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          6 days ago

          we have information that they were being sold

          Do you have any references to that? Pictures at least, or something? I mean, the person above repeatedly asks for details. Originally the claim was that the explanation is in the referenced article, but now it’s not. Where is it then?

          • Metr0pl3X@lemmy.mlM
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            6 days ago

            Nothing public no however it was stated to us by individuals similarly aware of these devices as those referenced in the vice article in contact with us.

    • trilobite@lemmy.ml
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      6 days ago

      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 …