A quiet but deeply unsettling moment just shook the foundations of international justice, proving why Europe needs digital sovereignty - and most Europeans not too interested in tech likely missed it: The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a court based in The Hague and central to Europe’s upholding of human rights, suddenly found that his email account was shut down. The service provider? Microsoft. The reason? Mr. Trump…
It’s nice to see – once again – how dangerous it is to put the entire infrastructure into the hands of one single company. A company, that not only immensely obstructs transparency, but also falls into the jurisdiction of foreign / non-EU institutions.
And now imagine the hidden extent of (industrial) espionage, which happens without notice, because we put our data and our communication into the hands of these very companies.
Plus those corporations being under the jurisdiction of a criminally corrupt, narcissistic political class; fuelled by a population suffering what can only be described as a propaganda induced mental illness epidemic … with the surveillance capitalism of those same corporations the likely cause — the attack vector — of the epidemic.
In the US, companies contracted by the federal government must comply with data storage location requirements that DO keep the data strictly within their territory and under national jurisdiction. i believe this falls under FedRAMP regulations. I’m 95%+ certain that major EU countries have equivalent policies (probably even better ones, considering the GDPR and so forth).
That correction aside, I completely agree with the larger concern here.