Law enforcement is being lazy by trying to rely on mass surveillance rather than espionage tactics to catch criminals. Criminals learned long ago how to work around surveillance, so this doesn't really work on them. But it does subject the public citizen to undue scrutiny and violation of privacy, which history has shown is then used against the innocent. We don't need any more reminders of how popular authoritarianism has become. And it's often used to pin a crime on an innocent person (a common police controversy), or intimidate and harass them (see FBI).
> I don't think population will stand at their side when they find that they've been helping CSAM traffickers hide their loot.
This is just one of many examples of a false rhetoric used by politicians to manipulate the public into cow-towing to mass surveillance. We cannot stand for this and must fight it at every turn. "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
Which is not to excuse the fascist actions of the French government. I just don't like that quote.
Something designed to be private doesn't know the difference between a law enforcement officer trying to break into it and a criminal trying to break into it.
There is no special "anti-cop only code" that gets executed, any more than there are special "cop tools" that exist on some physical plane where criminals don't.
You can slam onto the downvote button all you want, but if you don't UNDERSTAND it, you can't FIGHT it effectively.
It's a typical left failing where you pretend to be too dumb to understand where the authoritarians are coming from to effectively fight it.
They'll be targeted by the governments because of that perception.
If we can't trust hosted services to protect our data, and we can't trust our own computers to preserve our data, the right to privacy simply doesn't exist.
You don't need to persuade me about it. You need to persuade your cops and governments that having your OS secure outweighs their wish to make crime fighting easy.
To actually do any crime with GrapheneOS you would also need at least a VPN and basic understanding of operational security. Just as you would need a lot more than just a knife and car to be a successful criminal.
A Pixel phone with GrapheneOS is not some magic device that let's you do crime without immunity, but that’s the story they want to sell you.
GrapheneOS and its systems are - you can walk through history and see that they're deliberately working on systems that defeat law enforcements efforts of collecting data from seized devices and tracking criminal networks.
This is a massive difference - even for knives and cars, you'd get into some hot water (or outright illegal behaviour) if you build them with express purpose to make them hard to find and track by law enforcement. Try making a company that focuses on cars that hide its license plates from the police and you'll see how far that will go.
This is one thing that GrapheneOS, Signal and others will need to at some point reckon with - the fact that they deliberately work at making law enforcements work harder and provide effective cover for criminals will get them into hot water. And I don't think population will stand at their side when they find that they've been helping CSAM traffickers hide their loot.
Having all that anti-governmental rhethoric won't end well for longerm survivability of these projects - which sucks for all of us.