The Librem 5 is not a device designed to stop government spying on its users.
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It’s all the same. When the federal government goes to Google for geo-fencing information, to see who attended a protest, if I am at the protest with my Librem 5, my name will most likely not end up on that list. Good enough… until some Senator decides that my Librem 5 must participate in geo-fence tracking, by forcing Purism to change the features on the phone.
I don’t like how Federal statutes are passed that require carriers like Verizon and T-Mobile to force those “Presidential Alerts” on to our phones, greyed-out as turned on, so we can’t turn them off. These issues might seem quite trivial. But they’re actually quite important as they start a precedent. I don’t want any level of government to have any say in the features of my phone and what they think or say should be available or allowed. Granted, the carrier needs to have a license to use the airwaves. But beyond that, I don’t want lawmakers to even think about my phone. It’s mine. They just need to stay out of it. That was the point of my post. Any kind of collaboration with the government will only invite regulation.
If anyone is committing real crimes, not crimes like attending a protest, but real crimes, the government will catch them soon enough, regardless of what kind of phone they have or don’t have. But limiting access to some features on personally-owned equipment and forcing unwanted location tracking features on to people, seriously threatens our free society. I just don’t trust that government involvement won’t result in added regulation and additional systemic data collection on the masses.
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FWIW: My “aways” statement was a quote from a panel session at a wargame conference hosted by the military in June. It was a panel session about becoming a wargame contractor, I know the guy that originally said it on the panel.
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Perhaps the real answer has to come from Purism but I would imagine it is: understanding what government does and wants, shaping what government wants, and having the contacts and knowledge of how things work inside the Beltway in order to achieve those goals.
I’m prepared to give him a chance to prove his value.
The use cases are manifold. For you that may be a non-goal but for anyone else, who can say?
The (US) government already has enough legal power to do that. There is little Purism could do to resist such a demand. The warrant canaries are designed so that at least you know that that has happened.
Legitimate questions can be asked about the grey area in between legal compulsion and freely made changes. If a company becomes solely or substantially reliant on government sales for its revenue then changes can happen “voluntarily”.
Realistically, this kind of pressure can only really affect the design of a future version of the phone. If bad software changes occurred for the existing Librem 5, the software would fork, with the bad changes removed.
It’s fairly difficult to force geo-fencing on an existing Librem 5 with a removable battery.
As always, government has a massive conflict of interest. On the one hand, they need phones with maximum security for themselves. On the other hand, they always want backdoors that allow them to surveil their subjects.
It is not actually clear to me that (hypothetically) selling lots of phones to the US government would increase the US government’s interest in compromising the Librem 5. I suppose you could imagine that right now the US government doesn’t know that the Librem 5 exists and hence can’t make a decision to attempt to compromise it. However that is a bold assumption.
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I can rephrase my statement more clearly: Purism does not claim that the Librem 5 is a device designed to stop government spying on its users on its product page, documentation, and/or any of the blog articles from its various authors over the years.
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Another item from that conference panel, the same guy who said the “government always pays”, had another short story, thus: There was a preference for “women owned small business federal contract program”.
So he made his wife the CEO.
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I knew something was up when I saw all the unread messages this morning.
While I understand the concerns about the government contracts, my thinking is that they will probably get their own version of the device, but needless to say this is a good thing for the longevity of Purism and the Librem 5 and will push development into the forefront.
All the nagging issues that are still plaguing the device will get top priority now, with the infusion of cash from the government.
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with the hoped for infusion of cash from the government
FTFY. 
I don’t think either of the two relevant announcements is explicitly saying that the US government (or any other government entity) has bought a single device.
That would probably be bad - both because it is inherently inefficient (two devices to support and maintain) and because of the penultimate paragraph in my previous post.
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The difference is that ALL government funds are taken from US at the point of a gun, no exceptions. Google and the others, as bad as they can be, get their money from people who fork it over voluntarily. CEOs have nothing on government when it comes to “fruits of others’ labor”.
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Dragging things back on topic … one thing that I wonder about is what view the US government might take on the use of the Chinese Broadmobi modem. Will this be the spur to get the Gemalto modem created? or any more palatable modem?
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The Gemalto PLS8 is now owned by Telit Cinterion:
I was going to explain the modem’s absense by Purism in a separate thread, but I never got around to it due to lack of time and interest.
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This makes me want to laugh. Why would we assume the government doesn’t know the Librem 5 exists? I would sooner assume that they were well aware of it, and that I was on a secret list for buying one, and that I will never be informed that such a list exists.
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There are public records of the Librem 5 within various US government agencies and I would presume other agencies are aware of the Librem 5 offhand. I can say that some individuals working in cybersecurity, who are sometimes involved with government entities, are aware of the Librem 5, though I would say that their knowledge of it is just from personal curiosity and not from any ask to investigate it.
- FCC certification of the Librem 5: https://fccid.io/2AT9R-LIBREM5
- SEC filing, which mentions the Librem 5 a few times: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2007806/000166516024000045/0001665160-24-000045-index.htm
It seems that the FBI has spent resources to make its own phone company: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/23/24163389/joseph-cox-dark-wire-fbi-phone-startup-anom-criminals-secure-messaging-decoder-interview
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There’s a big difference between “imagine” (what I wrote) and “assume”. Also my comment has to be understood within the context of the thread of conversation, which admittedly is difficult due to multiple overlapping ideas and conversations.
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Right. I missed that. Apparently that happened in 2022.
Maybe that helps because Purism can trundle up the road to have a chat with Telit Cinterion if this is still a direction that Purism wants to go, and it makes it a more solid proposition for “made in America” (although the cellular chips may well still actually be made overseas).
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They don’t care. 
The US government is it’s biggest enemy. 
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Everything in life is a compromise. I know that Purism needs an infusion of cash and if they land a government contract, as much as that sounds counter intuitive to the cause here, it will guarantee the longevity of this product. That is something at the back of everyone’s mind.
I want to see the next iteration of the Librem 5 come to fruition, maybe even to the point where they could look at their own open source ASIC to reduce power consumption and all the other optimizations that would come with that. I know a guy can dream.
As for the government specific product, I don’t think that would impact the consumer version at all, I can’t see it being radically different but they may want their own tweaks so to speak.
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I just listened to the Dark Net Diaries about the Anom…I suggest you listen to it, absolutely crazy.
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