This article is far from an example of journalistic rigour. It’s a narrative-driven piece that leans heavily on the contested account of James Donaldson to tell a dramatic story. The limited responses from Daniel Micay are not given equal depth or weight, resulting in an imbalanced and skewed portrayal of his account.
Response from the GrapheneOS Foundation:
I’ll just say what I told WIRED when asked if I’d like to comment on this article a while ago: no comment. 
(Okay, one comment, I can agree that that WIRED absolutely did not present it as the heavily Donaldson-focused article it is to me at that time either lol)
Actually, finished reading the GOS post and they did post some interesting things in response to WIRED’s questions, I agree it’s a shame they were not incorporated at all into the article.
“Are you so much a f***ing loser, you can’t tell when you’ve won?” (Jacob in From Dusk Till Dawn).
I don’t get why GrapheneOS invests so heavily in narrative management. They are not a for-profit company. The article says:
“Wilson told me that education and awareness are cornerstones of GrapheneOS’s work.”
But why? It’s the product GrapheneOS that speaks for itself. Let others in the media evangelise for Graphene. I don’t see an equal alternative in terms of both privacy and security.
These constant, heavy-handed attempts at narrative adjustment rather damages GrapheneOS’s reputation. The article presents Micay in a rather good light - why such an upset response from GrapheneOS?
I am very happy with GrapheneOS; it’s only these incendiary, childish responses from them that sometimes make me think again.
Yeah, thanks for highjacking my contribution from this morning. This board is so frustrating. Is it being ran by kids? It feels like it is.
Doing a rare headline edit because the WIRED headline is so stupid, how are people supposed to even know what it’s about? Clickbait has gone too far.
From my POV, a lot of it is defense
I’ve seen bad actors engage in efforts to malign/discredit the GOS project. The recent French dispute is a strong example - public narrative had a real impact on GOS users and operations
It seems reasonable that they would invest in countermeasures, an effort to ‘keep the record straight’
Doesn’t change the fact that it’s national fucking news, and Wired reaches millions.
Also to be fair, GrapheneOS had already written like 80% of their “defense.” They had already sent it to Wired, just needed to copy/paste lol
The GrapheneOS mastodon account has been going off at WIRED over this article. It sucks that Graphene keeps getting (alleged) hit pieces against them these days.
Other news outlets have also spun their responses and GOS forum discussion as drama too. Sigh.
I don’t see how this is a hit piece. The article makes the Donaldson character sound like a greedy sell-out and Micay a genius taking an uncompromising ethical stance by burning the keys.
In a 2017 interview with Vice, Donaldson was asked whether he was ever tempted to use his powers for evil. “That depends,” he said, “on your definition of evil.”
Micay likely had a definition. Between licensing the OS and the possibility of doing business with defense contractors, he seemed to feel the integrity of his code was eroding as quickly as his agency in the Copperhead partnership. Not only was CopperheadOS no longer available to the masses, it was starting to serve the very people Micay wanted to protect users from. Above all else, his partner seemed to be determining the fate of the system he had built.
and
“He threatened to seize Daniel’s workstations to recover what he claimed was property of Copperhead,” said Dave Wilson, who’d later work closely with Micay. Surely this was Donaldson’s last-ditch effort to cash in on his work before they parted ways, and Micay was, apparently, livid. He was being ousted from the project he had spent years building. There was no way he was giving up the keys.
and
GrapheneOS was a direct continuation of his work at Copperhead, the company said, just under a new name. This time around, the project would be run entirely on donations and remain open source. It would “never again be closely tied to any particular sponsor or company,” said Wilson, who joined Micay as GrapheneOS’s community manager. It would be a nonprofit. “In a way,” Wilson added, “I gotta give [Donaldson] credit to the degree that he did participate in the creation of GrapheneOS in some weird shape or form.”
If I were writing this as a Hollywood script, Micay is the hero of the story.
Yet, in the comments of the GOS page, we have:
and again
No, our community should be helping instead of expecting Daniel to defend himself and make himself into even more of a target.
They should not engage, nor should they rally the troops to go have a big debate online. When they do that, they keep showing true colours that are much uglier than the product they’ve made. All those comments about /e/OS are mind-boggling. Who cares what /e/OS says or rather said? Let the reviewers decide which is the stronger product.
I liked “The-Man’s” response in the comments on the GOS platform:
Stop online bickering with these idiots, its not a good look and its obviously not working,
If you have a provable case, take the fuckers to court.
The Wired article spreads the word about GrapheneOS to a much wider audience, and that is a service to Graphene. It states
Last year, 404 Media reported on leaked documents from Cellebrite, a software that helps retrieve data from locked phones. The documents, which detailed Cellebrite’s success rate across different Pixel generations, found that “every locked Pixel 9 running GrapheneOS was inaccessible.”
What more do you want? It’s great advertising for GrapheneOS.
Case in point (or point in case, which is it?)
Reading through the comments on HN, it’s the so-called defenders of GrapheneOS that come across as cultish and make me think that maybe I shouldn’t be using GrapheneOS. They harm the brand and should not be rallied in this way.
“If the inhumane level of attacks weren’t happening, they would have more time to discuss future features…ignoring the attacks only makes it worse.”
This hybrid guy talks like we are all children that need guidance. It’s terrible advertising for what is otherwise an excellent product.
I really don’t even think it’s the user base so much. I mean, yeah, they can be the Arch Linux type of the mobileOS world. But for me, it was that one developer. Good God.
I don’t question for a second that it’s probably the most solid mobile OS you could use right now, and I completely trust the people who vouch for it. But man, those text messages from that one developer to Louis Rossmann, were some of the wildest things I’ve ever read. And that’s not even touching on the unhinged threats sent to the Reddit mods. It got so bad that people over there literally treat the project’s name like Voldemort now. Just seeing all that unfold in real time was enough to permanently put me off from installing it. They really need to get their messaging and PR under control.
It is interesting how this policy has stuck around on r/Privacy.
I totally agree with you @ThePrivacyDad that when I read the article this morning it came off as (almost unreasonably) favorable to Micay and GrapheneOS.
That being said, reading GrapheneOS’s forum post it’s pretty obvious why they are so disappointed anyways. They were asked a lot of questions that ultimately ended up having little to do with the final piece. Just from the introductory questions alone, I was surprised that despite GrapheneOS’s long written responses, Wired didn’t mention Dan McGrady a single time (seems like a third founder is at least noteworthy), and instead went along with this narrative of Micay and Donaldson just being two great buddies who went into business together.
At the end of the day it’s kind of a puff piece story and they probably wanted actual solid coverage.
