They Built a Legendary Privacy Tool. Now They’re Sworn Enemies

It’s unfortunate this Wired article is incurious; it doesn’t go into much detail about the other side of Micay. Yes, he’s a technological genius, and he’s had his fair share of unwarranted reactions, but he was often the aggressor in many online disputes. For example, article mentions this:

Open source advocacy groups like the Guardian Project, as well as the Google Play store alternative F-Droid, started inquiring about partnerships. In 2018, CopperheadOS was featured in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.

But they don’t mention that a few years later, Micay was accusing F-Droid developers of carrying out a coordinated attack on him. And accusing Reddit moderators of being complicit. And attacking Louis Rossman, a project supporter.

Wired barely touches this, failing to even mention Rossman or interrogate whether the exposés (what a choice of word) were true or now.

In turn, users fought back. A couple people made videos “exposing” their private conversations with Micay; others made a show of deleting GrapheneOS. The GrapheneOS team itself was accused of going after competing projects and dissenting parties.

We can see GrapheneOS’ team, or at least its most prominent member, was indeed going after competing projects. No need to dilute that point, Wired.

Frankly, when I see public-facing evidence of Micay attacking others for no good reason, it makes it harder for me to believe that Micay has accurately represented his beef with Donaldson.

Edit: apparently Daniel Micay feels very differently about the Wired story than I do.

WIRED has published an article about GrapheneOS with a history of the project nearly entirely based on fabrications from James Donaldson. Donaldson has spent the past 8 years trying to destroy GrapheneOS and the life of the project’s founder, Daniel Micay. Donaldson has heavily engaged in fabrications with an ever changing story about the history of the project… Their claims have been thoroughly debunked [where?] at this point and are primarily an issue in the form of an extreme level of fabrications and harassment they started which is carried on without them. James Donaldson has been thoroughly proven to be a serial fabricator, scammer and thief. Despite this, WIRED listened to his tall tales and presented it as a history of GrapheneOS. We weren’t given an opportunity to provide an actual history of the project based in fact as we were led to believe it wasn’t a major part of the article and were barely asked about it.

Edit 2: Micay calls on his community to “oppose” critics on forums.

many of the usual suspects are attacking GrapheneOS and our team with fabrications.

Who?

These attacks should be opposed instead of letting a vocal minority dominate the narrative by investing substantial time in lying about GrapheneOS.

This is good and healthy behavior