Few comments on the article.

First, if you're an open-source developer or organization and you're asked an interview by mainstream medias, this is fine to be a little careful. You're free to have few rounds of exchange with the journalists to scope the interview and ask under which the angle the article is expected to be. This is fine to exercise your right of correction and explicitly ask the media to insert your version of the facts.

Secondly, on cryptography at large, last year the European Court of Human Rights implicitly recognized the legitimacy of end-to-end encryption in a landmark decision (ECHR, Podchasov v. Russia, 13 February 2024) and underscoring the worthiness of end-to-end encryption in a democratic society in the era of Internet. As far as I know, no other similar decision has been yielded by a supreme court in any other worldwide jurisdictions. France is a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights, so ECHR decisions have to be followed by French courts in principle, minus the caveats.

Thirdly, on the question on the criminalization of intent for the simple usage of encryption tooling or data deletion tools like the alleged usage of GrapheneOS in the Parisien article under French law, this is a controversial legal question. There are series of cases pending in front of the highest French court for criminal matters on this topic of usage of those kind of tools and it's a controversial topic.

Most of the time, you have the law enforcement authorities doing the wider interpretation of the legal texts (I'm respecting their wish for efficiency but fundamental rights matters too...) and then after the facts, courts intervening to put a "calm down". This is a reason why France has effective separation of powers, and why separation of powers matters in any democratic society.

Fourthly, from the latest news, EU Chat Control has been drop on the floor by the European legislator as least for now (https://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/article/2025/10/31/chat-control-le-projet-europeen-de-surveillance-des-messageries-largement-abandonne_6650578_4408996.html). To be frank, I don't see how such text would have survived judicial checks and challenges, given the myriad of legal texts and grounds on which to strike it or render the legal effects ineffective.

With all those caveats, let's be frank if you're working on privacy-first or human-rights first open-source softwares, and you have the choice to pick up the worldwide jurisdictions under which to operate, in my humble opinion you're better off to be based in Germany or Czech Republic rather than France, US or Canada. The former have known the URSS and its wide surveillance state, so culturally there are far more respectfully of privacy and human rights.

Rien de tres nouveau sous le soleil.