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While Brussels champions policy initiatives and American tech giants market their own ‘sovereign’ solutions, a handful of public authorities in Austria, Germany, and France, alongside the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT.
These cases provide a potential blueprint for a continent grappling with its technological autonomy, while simultaneously revealing the deep-seated legal and commercial challenges that make true independence so difficult to achieve.
The core of the problem lies in a direct and irreconcilable legal conflict. The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe’s own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
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Sweden is not. Our tax office decided only this year to migrate everything to the Office 365 cloud despite Microsoft admitting that they’d turn over any data to the US government should they be asked to. I think the EU should step in on this.
Finland moved election vote count system to Amazon’s cloud service. Votes are still given on paper, but the results are counted on AWS’ servers, which theoretically gives Amazon the possibility to affect our election results from here on out.
That is fucking insane.
In Ireland in 2002 they tried to bring in electronic voting. It cause uproar, they had already paid for the machines so for almost a decade the machines stayed in storage in ‘accomplices’ - storage facilities among other friends locations.
The machines cost €55m (to buy and store)
Storing the machines cost as much as €700,000 one year
Dropping slightly a few years later
Election Officials to get €400,000 from state for storing them
The €51m machines were eventually sold for scrap for €70,000
Ireland could still be paying some costs until 2029 regardless that the machines have been scrapped
That’s crazy, I hope electronic voting is never allowed in Portuguese elections.
The Dutch tax agency did the same, mostly because there are supposedly no sufficiently capable European alternatives.
(Worth specifying that it’s specifically about the Office 365 suite, and not the software for handling tax returns)
And don’t forget that the Dutch digital ID was outsourced to a Dutch company that was now bought by a US company. The Dutch way for the government to digitally identify Dutch citizens is about to be in US hands.
Afaik Solvinity, the company that takes care of he infrastructure behind DigiD and MijnOverheid, is on the verge of being bought by the US company Kyndryl. But it hasn’t been sold yet.
Hypothetically the government could still stop it on the grounds of national interest. Though you can see how well that went with Nexperia…
With the government being “demissionair” however, idk if they will.
It would certainly draw the attention of America is we did.
Ah, I wasn’t aware that it wasn’t 100% done yet. Shame that I have 0 trust that they’ll do anything about this.
Can you just stop filing taxes because you don’t wanna violate EU data protection laws? /s
Filing taxes in sweden means going to the tax agencys website, identifying with your phone, and they already have everything pre-calculated so you just sign it digitally, takes 5 minutes. If you ignore it I think it’s the same as accepting it after a certain date.
To elaborate a bit more: the only reason to not just signing directly is if you want to declare things like “I have commuted this distance this year and want a tax cut on my commute” or other special case things you might apply for. Or if you have a small business or something. So for like 75 %, simply just signing the pre-filled tax is enough.
I wish Canada had that system.
Spain has the same - but getting the signature to work on Linux isn’t too easy.
Fixing things like that - demanding that government services are accessible by open and free software - is a major step.
I don’t know much about Sweden, but the government released a report including options for digital collaboration platform technologies for the public sector in 2021 (available in English and Swedish, both a s pdf).
At least the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning has chosen Nextcloud in 2022.
No Swedish governement agency can freely choose a technical solution. Almost all such choises fall under a public procurement, which are heavily regulated. They can demand that the service supports certain things to exclude actors, but if too strict I think the procurement can be overturned. In some cases a US actor can just offer a low enough price and the agency more or less have to pick them.
I feel like ”adhering to GDPR and not sharing personal information of citizens with actors outside the EU” would be a reasonable requirement. But I’m not lobbied by big tech so what do I know.