Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
korte.coTrump 1.0 should've been enough, but instead European leaders were just too thankful for a Biden back-to-normal scenario that they basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance.
Better late than never. Incidentally, trying to build EU tech independence should produce job making industries, so can become a populist move also
We're already seeing that in a few cases but it just stands to get worse if this carries on.
A lot of this was laundered through Hungary: https://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-viktor-orban-favorit... ; hopefully some of those involved can be jailed by the incoming administration for misusing government funds.
I think people like trump because the idea of burning it all to the ground and starting over sounds nice. It’s a very simple solution to a very complex problem, and dumb people really gravitate towards that.
Of course they never really considered what “burn it all down” meant. It meant all, nobody is safe. No business is safe.
"According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück."
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
I love this. Do you think everything is in Europe's control? Do you know anything about the US has operated since WW2? Have you noticed the mismatch in economic and military might between the two regions?
And what about all the US military bases in Europe? Do you think it's simply a case of asking them to please leave within 1 year, thanks, goodbye.
They've had us in a headlock for a very very long time
https://tuta.com/blog/fourteen-eyes-countries
And are proposing their own EU version as well....
>Incoming Dutch coalition floats European version of ‘Five Eyes’
https://www.politico.eu/article/new-dutch-government-floats-...
But recently, after Trump, I have never seen anti American sentiment this bad. It is the first time.
Actually, it is natural. In my view, Trump's policies look very similar to the Indian caste system, and I think they are a serious regression for democracy. More than that, he is destroying all the international trust that the US has built up. In Korea, people used to think of the US as a 'just' country, but these days, people are cautiously mentioning US wrongdoing more often. Especially after the tariffs and the Iran war. I myself am now unemployed because my factory expansion was canceled due to the Iran war.
My country has a natural talent for impeaching presidents, but unfortunately, Americans do not seem to have that talent. What a pity.
Bad is subjective?
https://kbthink.com/news-list/view.html?newsId=2026011611543...
It seems Korea lacks the "cheat code" for fascism: an ethnic minority population on which all evil can be blamed.
Yes, I understand that it would be imperfect since inevitably not all servers would support it thus forcing additional understanding and decisions on the end user. No, I don't care that a user other than myself might leak my messages in plaintext. Perfectionism in this regard only serves to further shoot us in the foot. Yes, I understand that key distribution is a difficult problem but then that's the case no matter the protocol. Other protocols have solutions that work reasonably well at this point.
There's no justification for the current status quo.
Alternatively I'd be fine using matrix for all my PII related needs (healthcare, government, subscription services, etc, etc) but somehow I don't see that happening any time soon.
With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.
And then you'd still need to worry about digital sovereignity for the keys.
And if those keys are stored by a company subject to US jurisdiction, we're back to the same problem.
Key escrow is the usual solution to an employer needing access to employee materials.
Yes, and you move the problem to "is the entity/process/whatever handling key escrow under US jurisdiction"?
Otherwise, a public servant could do sketchy stuff behind the public's back with no paper trace.
What you don't want is hostile foreign capitalists leaking your data to their local authoritarians. They are not your public and shouldn't have the data in the first place.
I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the countries pushing digital IDs?
> Official second-level domains do not exist.
Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.
Yes, this results in enshittification.
If the government needs trucks then they should just buy trucks, not build a factory to make trucks and then another factory to make lead acid batteries for the trucks and then start mining lead to make the batteries etc.
At some point they have to interface with the market and you still have to solve the problem of keeping the market competitive and keeping the bidding process from being captured. If you're not doing those things then you're screwed either way; if you are doing them then it's better to just buy finished goods than to have civil servants manufacturing doorknobs and operating rubber tree plantations to make weather stripping.
The two big ones I see off the top of my head are:
1) Once the government has paid for digital services from some private company, they are then providing those digital services to their country's public.
2) Because of that, they are then also storing their people's data in those systems.
If (say) Ford decides they don't like the government of (say) Belgium, and don't want to sell them any more transit vans (or whatever), that's not really a huge deal. Belgium has the vans already, and they can just get another supplier for the next set.
If Microsoft decides they don't like the government of Belgium, even if they don't decide to do anything nefarious with the data (which is absolutely a real concern, both from malice and incompetence), they can shut off their services overnight and then the people of Belgium have no governmental websites or digital services. (And if they have a contract that says they can't...well, what's Belgium going to do about it? Ask Trump real real nice to make Microsoft keep the lights on?) Or, even if they're perfectly polite and commit to an orderly transition, Belgium still has to put in absolutely massive amounts of time, effort, and money to select a new vendor and migrate all their data and retrain all their people on the completely different interfaces and such.
Whereas when they start buying new vans from Mercedes...the drivers might have to remember that the radio's volume knob is 5cm away from where it was in the Fords...?
This is ignoring that AI also, of course, lets spying agencies move from having every email ever sent in most countries to actually reacting to every email ever sent in most countries. They can move from helping Boeing make foreign airline companies ignore door closing issues to influencing every last restaurant's drinks buying decision individually.
I mean, I doubt they're there yet, but that's what they'll want to do.
Disaster, meet Catastrophe.
America was supposed to be the next step of humanity, a new land stripped from the ills of the old world where you invest or you go to build things, where your past or identity wasn't the primary concern but your dreams your abilities were. It wasn't nationalistic place, it was open to all and pretty much it was the group work of humanity. When aliens arrive, they arrived to US and even if not, they certainly wanted to speak to the US president as the leader of humanity.
Unlike Europe it wasn't stuck into petty identity conflicts, unlike Russia or China it was governed by the law and the law would protect you from the sneaky politicians. Unlike Europe, US companies were fair businesses that could protect you the customer from bad things even if America developed European or Asian habits.
Why wouldn't you use anything from America? Americans don't understand how transactional they are becoming and that from now on they will need to perform. Like the Tesla boycott, suddenly Tesla had to price their vehicles to match the functionality they provide in order to be able to sell cars again.
Currently the US tech tools are better as they were refined for decades with huge resources and user bases, so it is hard to switch away and at this time it's the perception of risk and US no longer being cool are what pushes for the transition but if EU is lucky Trump will invade Greenland and will make people take the inconvenient path and US tech industry will compact into 350M US market. Europeans will have a few years of sub-par tech and then will have good sovereign tech.
All throughout my adult life the US (for all its apparent faults) was to me a shining example of progress and humanity. It was the best large scale implementation of human rights, laws, and democracy. Sure it was far from perfect but “as good as it gets, for now”
Became very disillusioned with that image of the US in the last couple of years. Maybe it’s always been like that - but the recent cronyism, the blatant openly displayed corruption and complete disregard for all the values it used to champion really destroyed the good image I had of the US.
In years to come they will realise what this loss of image (or “aura” as the kids would say) really means in a very practical and blunt sense.
Which country was the US bombing to the ground at this period you're reminiscing on?
That literally never happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haditha_massacre?wprov=sfla1
> By June 17, 2008, six defendants had their cases dropped and a seventh was found not guilty.[5] The only one of the eight charged to face punishment was Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich. On October 3, 2007, the Article 32 hearing investigating officer recommended that charges of murder be dropped and Wuterich be tried for negligent homicide in the deaths of two women and five children.[6] Further charges of assault and manslaughter were ultimately dropped. Wuterich pled guilty to the only remaining charge, one count of negligent dereliction of duty, and was convicted on January 24, 2012.[7][8]
...
Labeling 300+ million people as "the good guys" grouping then by nation (I assume with "Americans" you mean US American citizen and not, for example, Mexicans?) but then trying to detach a nation from its politics is wild and the notion of "they are the good guys even when they do terrible things" is some weird circular or contradicting argument (depending on how I've wants to play that).
American soldiers trained their weapons on those Americans to halt the killing.
America has always contained multitudes, but chose to see the best in itself and the world saw it reflected in that light.
One of the most shocking things to me was visiting Vietnam and going to the Museum of American War Crimes in Ho Chi Minh City and almost the first thing you see walking in is the words of the US Declaration of Independence in enormous letters, printed across an entire wall: "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."
They are throwing America's own principles back in its face, castigating America for behaving in a way that is un-American. The world believed in what America claims it believes.
Principles have never been about that. The world has never been about that. It's never been something anyone who wasn't "that kind of nerd" could believe in. Not even up for debate.
It used to be that when the US did something bad, people would point to the constitution and the American ideals and say "this isn't living up to our promise".
Now instead when people point to the constitution and American ideals people say "those were written by dead white men" as if to justify cynically discarding them in favor of something heinous.
What other promises have you ever had? What did you think justice meant? You losers talking of WW2 and Rome. Now sit back down.
Meanwhile abandoning freedom of speech or due process because of the skin color of the persons who penned the original documents can only be described as some kind of wackadoodle nonsense and evokes suspicions of arguing in bad faith.
But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check.
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men — yes, Black men as well as white men — would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.
We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
I firmly believe that the dominant feeling towards US today isn't anger or hate, its heartbreak and disappointment.
It might be different for US Americans themselves and a lot of other countries as well; but for a large part of the west this was/is true
As I grew older, I'd learn more about bad things US did throughtout history. Downsides of its policies. Some of the burdens it placed on other nations. Shortcuts it took to enhance the American way of life @ the cost of people elsewhere. Examples are just too many. The shining beacon became a grey area. But overall, tended to regard US' influence as a net positive.
These days, it's crystal clear to me why so many people cherish a deep hatred towards the US. Again: reasons are many & complicated. I don't happen to be among them, but understand their reasons.
US has fallen from being a shining example for the world, to a dumb & selfish kid doing damage everywhere. Damage the rest of the world scrambles to route around.
Sadly, this is not the result of external pressures on the US. Nor the (sole) fault of its current leadership. It came from within. It's damage the US is doing to itself, and to others.
This will not improve any time soon, I think. We'll take Lady Liberty's flame on your way out, thank you very much.
We dreamed of America
where the soft wind lives.
We dreamed of America
where honey flowers grow,
where the sky is vast and blue
with stars and stripes upon it too.
We dreamed of America,
but not anymore,
no, not anymore.
I don't know when people first began dreaming of America.
Long before Columbus, people dreamed of America, I think.
A place of everlasting flowers where everyone was free and happy, and
no one had to take off their hat for anyone unless they wanted to themselves.
A smiling paradise where love lasts forever,
and old age is beautiful, a place without any smell.
In 1945—before that too, but certainly in 1945—I knew what I was going to be
when I grew up.
I was going to be an *American*.
That spring, the first films from the Pacific War arrived,
where the Americans stood with bent knees on jungle paths and shot Japanese soldiers with U.S. carbines.
The Japanese were ugly, with protruding teeth and protruding ribs,
while the Americans were brave, handsome, clean-cut, and immortal.
And even if they did die, they died with a courageous smile and said:
"Give this letter to my mother; she will understand."
While the Japanese died like grubs and worms,
and we felt no pity for them.
Besides being ugly, they were portrayed as horribly stupid—so stupid that they spoke broken English even when talking to each other.
I know that we dreamed of America well into the 1960s.
A scentless land beyond the sea,
where everyone had cars and white teeth.
I don't know exactly when it stopped.
But one day in the 1960s, we not only stopped loving America as a god;
we began hating America as a fallen god.
And nothing falls so heavily, so hard, and so deep
as a fallen god
who turns out not to be a god at all,
but merely America.
Then America was blamed not only for the Vietnam War and environmental disasters,
but also, for example, for car culture.
And the greatest share of the blame fell on the man who discovered America.
Now, 487 years after his death, Christopher Columbus is blamed not only for the slave trade from West Africa,
but also for the murder of Kennedy,
and for all the worlds traffic accidents.
Now they say Columbus was a bastard.
Because it was he who discovered America in 1492.At least they cannot read this ridiculous load of propaganda.
The person making project X days are over. The energy and drive is extinguished from humanity. Ambition is all that’s left.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-dai... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/meta-quietly-launches-a-ne...
It is open source and supported by Nextcloud, IONOS, Proton, Tuta and more.[1]
I haven't tried it out, bu you can find the documentation on how to host it yourself here: https://euro-office.github.io/documentation/
A more mature alternative would is Nextcloud as it offers a lot more, but setup is reportedly more involved. It does appear to be available for enterprise customers as hosted version as well though: https://nextcloud.com/office/
And it's not "The EU", but really one EU commissioner. Many organs of the EU including the EU Legal Service have criticised CSAR (Chat Control) and the European Parliament has voted against it, effectively killing it.
But I think the only way to establish these laws would be an IT competent judicative branch of the government... which, as we all know, is pretty incompetent in these manners.
consider Hanlon's razor before being mad and sending everyone to court for treason
Either ways, something needs to change
After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital sovereignty as we ban construction of new datacenter is just too cute. This is all just political theater as we peacefully sunset into a museum continent.
Europe's biggest problem (I do not mean just the EU, I mean everyone from the UK to Russia) is that it is in denial about its decline, weakness and irrelevance to the rest of the world.
The UK is a bit of an exception in being aware of it and actually talking about it. That is about it.
I disagree on this broad statement.
Europe is relatively a much smaller fraction of the global economy or population than it was a few decades ago. It is militarily less significant. How is that not a decline?
Shooting the messenger is just another sign of being in denial.
You presented no argument yourself, just a broad "denial". Which is, as GP said, is wrong. I am sure plenty of people are in denial but plenty are well aware of the real situation and doing things about it.
Yes and most of my friends are aware. It isnt a big problem because Quality of Life is still very fine. So present your arguments. How are people in denial?
Btw, say what you will about Russia, but it's light years ahead of the EU in digital sovereignty. One of the reasons it did not crumble under sanctions.
It has positioned itself at the center of the world's largest free trade zone.
It's managed to replace US contributions to Ukraine and looks like its in the process of bloodying Russia's nose.
Reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated.
It seems to me that this is still all the EU not keeping up with where the world is going. We started drafting the mercosur agreement 27 years ago so we finalize it and call it a victory, all that it's probably going to do is precipitate the demise of our domestic agribusiness, so that farmers won't be able to cause a ruckus in Brussels anymore.
We do not need China to be a democracy. That’s a matter for the Chinese people. Imposing a form of government from outside rarely works and is really counter-productive most of the time.
The point of all this free trade ideology is that it would make the whole world into peaceful liberal democracies.
But the reason for free trade is economy, and that it in theory makes everyone richer (but not necessarily free). In reality things are more complicated, both in term of strategic dependency, and distribution of the increased wealth. But economy is the answer to your question.
China's system of government is China's matter. I think we could learn a lot from them, actually.
Immigration will be vital to the survival of Europe. We are far below replacement level birth rates and we'll need new young people to keep our societies functioning. Being European is about values, not the color of your skin. If immigrants don't live up to those, we can sanction. But we can't just let Europe die out because of some sense of racial superiority.
Third world immigration actually makes things worse in two ways. The first one is that we have recently discovered that third world immigrants are net negative economically across their lifetime due to social security. The second one is that they all move to the big cities exacerbating the sponge city problem and its effects on fertility.
> But we can't just let Europe die out because of some sense of racial superiority.
What we are actually doing is we are letting europe die out of a sense of moral superiority, that we can do away with nasty (hydrocarbons) or scary (nuclear) sources of energy, that we must take in every third worlder because letting them live in the thrid world is a crime, that AI must be regulated to death because it enriches billionaries and "technofascists", etc etc
It reminds me of that scene in the ninth gate, we are going bankrupt in the way former nobility goes bankrupt.
Korea, Canada, Latin America, India. They're all bound to us. Europe is just the imperial capital of the largest economic region in the world.
Those countries also have trade deals with each other, and with other trading blocks. The EU us not the top trading partners for any one of them, and, because its low growth, is becoming increasingly less important to all of them.
People seriously think this but it was people voting for Brexit that were suppose remainers claimed hankering for empire.
This sort of claim is pure wishful thinking, and only strengthens my belief that Europeans are in denial.
Let's see how far China and US will go when access to the European consumer market will be resticted.
Let's see how well China and US can adapt to modern drone warfare when Ukrainians have the expertise and can share it with the rest of Europe.
We have to step up our game for sure, and everyone in Europe knows it. But the race is definitely not lost yet.
The UK's defence minister resigned today because of the prime minister's refusal to adequately fund defence.
I agree we don't have high economic growth, mainly an issue with scaleups and regulation. There are also plenty of initiatives there, like EU Inc.
We are waking up, so claiming that we are sleeping at the wheel is plain false.
It doesn't seems like this. It hasn't even been ten years since Europeans ridiculed Trump for making such calls, and it doesn't look like anything has changed.
> Let's see how far China and US will go when access to the European consumer market will be resticted.
Why do you think access to the European market is so critical?
> Let's see how well China and US can adapt to modern drone warfare when Ukrainians have the expertise and can share it with the rest of Europe.
Ukraine is a deindustrialized country, corrupt at every level. Their experience is worth little, and if you think they understand what a drone warfare is, wait until you see China in action, which has thousands of times more capable engineers and can produce drones that are better, ten times cheaper, and in tens of thousands times greater volume.
Please at least try to make your LLM write better. It can! You can start by giving it https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md.
Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens.
It's a bit flabbergasting that U.S. tech companies didn't see this coming years ago and lobby hard for the U.S. to repeal anti-privacy legislation like the CLOUD act. Their lunch is sitting out in the open, completely unwatched, waiting to be eaten by somebody else and it's far too late to do anything about it.
The respectable, politically popular country setting this up would simply say yes to the International Criminal Court, but no to Putin.
This doesn't work well as a blacklist of "everyone's allowed unless they turn out to be sanctioned", because some shell company or reseller could register and actually be a front for Russia or whatever other bogeyman. But just serving enormous respectable organisations is a big niche in itself.
Notice also that you're only handling the entities large enough to do things in-house to begin with. Meanwhile one of the biggest problems here is industrial espionage, which is to say startups with interesting new technology.
And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies
UBS tried to hold for as long as they could, and the choice the US given them is "pay a fine (accrues daily) or be cut from world financial system run by dollar".
UBS ultimately paid a 780 million fine. The rest of Swiss banks followed suit immediately.
Many things in the world happen, and most of the dumb bullshit that happens is imposed by US. This naiivete has to stop, the times have changed, and you, you spefically are part of the problem.
Wanna refuse? No problem. Of course you can. You're outside the US jurisdiction.
But every USD transaction you do is subject to, IIRC, 30% tax. Unless the US decides to block it altogether.
Nice attempt at whitewashing and gaslighting, but the only entity here that decided that is the fucking US of A.
That's a nice re-write of history.
What actually happened is that the US said: cut the crap and leave the opaque banking to us, else...
that might change is privacy is an option. The real problem is the cost of building in the middle of nowhere, even if you use spare Starlink capacity, where do you get power & personnel from?
Wind, hydro, sun? This is 2026 after all.
> personnel
Depends on what that theoretical country would offer. Some kind of strong constitutionally-enshrined protections for privacy and perhaps from tyranny-of-the-majority exploiting upper-middle class like all other western countries and with strong IT jobs market? Are you kidding, sign me up!
There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
Some countries went with SmartCards that you can use on any platform that can communicate with a card reader basically.
HarmonyOS
In theory you could have something produced by a country other countries might be willing to trust, but the number of countries that are both trustworthy and large enough to sustain a globally-viable platform is practically the empty set at this point.
Which means the thing it calls for is something open source, since that both allows contributions from multiple countries and solves the trust issue by leaving no single entity in control of it.
So giving your data to the Chinese government, while not a great solution, may still be preferable over giving it to the U.S. for someone in the EU given the closer relationship between EU governments and the U.S. than EU governments and the Chinese government.
Of course, this may be the opposite of what you want from a national perspective.
In other words China doesn't have to be trustworthy as long as the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.
If the USA were to ever weaken into irrelevance then yes messing with foreign HarmonyOS users might have some possibility that can’t be easily dismissed.
As long as the USA doesn’t become completely toothless then the incentives would point in the opposite… as long as Huawei behave scrupulously they are nearly guaranteed to win and dethrone the incumbents for most of the world.
Moreover, everybody knows how the enshittification cycle works at this point. They don't openly betray you when they have 0.3% market share, they just fit you for a noose that gets tighter as their market power increases. But because everybody now expects that to happen, who is going to use it to begin with if it's not open source and correspondingly resistant to rug pulls?
I dont see how US decisions on Huawei are relevant to the prospects of HarmonyOS in the future, when that’s already been priced in?
neither are Microsoft 365 subscriptions at governmental scales
No offence, but I do believe a few Dutch ppl could run email servers for cheaper
The US big tech has been in bed with the US establishment since eternity.
Then it was split in a camp dependent on the US and a camp dependent on the USSR.
Both the US and USSR spent decades keeping us together but definitely not united.
This runs deep in European political culture.
Until 2 years ago many Dutch people had more in common and more trust in Americans than <insert European country>. If only because half of them go broke once every generation.
But yes both US and Russia (perhaps China too) might stand to gain from Europe staying divided as it is.
I self-host e2ee services instead of server side encryption, even though I control the server. It's one less point of failure.
If the data centers can't see the data they're just hosting encrypted data like a Tor node that sends along gibberish–that's the endgame. Remove extra trusted parties to minimize data.
This also applies to metadata, that can be encrypted. SimpleX has 0 user identifiers, Signal's sealed sender encrypts the senders identity. Every Monero transaction is in the publicly distributed blockchain, hidden.
Hardly a decade ago, a well documented part of prism was on how Berlin was being scanned all the way up to the chancellor
Could the Dutch government think they were any different to the Germans ? Did they not use outlook ?
You put a lot of hope in managers from large companies and governments who get their rent and yearly bonuses no matter their performance, and will never ever be made redundant
The way they break the informative tone and circle around the bush in AZ900 absolutely looks like a admission that they do and is peak hilarious:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/describe-...
>Describe the shared responsibility model
> How responsibilities shift in cloud
"the consumer is responsible for the data and information stored in the cloud. (You wouldn’t want the cloud provider to be able to read your information.) "
(Am I doing this right?)
[0]: https://hackernoon.com/the-factors-prompting-a-judge-to-issu...