6 ms·

Euro execs mull use of US clouds

63 points by rcarmo 1y ago

jimbob45 1y ago
This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator Just a straight conflict of interest.
- rapnie 1y ago
  Here it is better to quote in context, though (italic mine): > This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator which undoubtedly has skin in the game, having campaigned against what it sees as unfair practices by the hyperscalers for some time. > Nevertheless, [..]
- peterpost2 1y ago
  That they have an self-interest does not necessarily mean that they don't have a point. It's obvious at this point that the American government should not be trusted with European governments data. Hell, you could even argue that the American government should not be trusted with the data of it's own citizens, them having let Doge and Elon Musk have had access to citizen information.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  The problem with decrying any conflict of interest is that you end up having non-expert research by people who are not familiar with the field.
ManBeardPc 1y ago
Yes. We free ourselves from the US dependency by... letting Microsoft, Amazon and Google build them. I don't see anything changing, still more and more companies and projects are moving to the US cloud providers. There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative. Not generally true IMHO, but many companies are structured in a way that makes a good internal IT nearly impossible.
- kristianc 1y ago
  Yes - what this will mean in most if not nearly all situations is using a hyperscaler’s services in a data zone that you or your customers are more comfortable with, not switching off them wholesale.
- spwa4 1y ago
  This is how it always goes in the EU. "The US becomes less reliable/invests less/... so we'll do it and put in a BIG effort" big announcement from Brussels. Usually repeated 5 times or so by some head of state of France and/or Germany. Then you check the "BIG effort" the EU makes and it's, 10 years of 0 budget + 5% of the budget US invests yearly for 3 years + never looking at it again. To make it worse from that point, they mostly don't divide such budgets across a million small proposals like the US does. No, the politicians in the Brussels find 2 or 3 companies or institutions they like and sign a contract with them. Which results in the many (usually small) companies that actually have accomplishments not getting their business, but big consultancies or institutions or ... getting the contracts by promising to divide the business among pre-agreed subcontractors (doing the EU's job for them, or at least the administration/checking job the US government does in the US, and the subcontractors especially have to be in the right countries). Afterwards, they don't even check what was actually accomplished, and intervening is just unheard of. Meanwhile you look at it, and you're forced to conclude: 1) scientists will not be leaving the US under Trump. Yes the difference between the EU and US will become smaller, but still heavily in favor of the US (as in >100% difference, factors, not percentage points). In pay, in budget (ie. for research equipment), in infrastructure, in existing knowledge, and of course in future job prospects after research. Also: it's not just the US universities that are coming under increasing pressure. 2) the EU brain drain towards the US will continue in other sectors too (IT, medicine, pharma, ...) 3) cloud business will continue migrating to the US (whether we're talking Salesforce or AWS EC2) 4) factories will keep migrating to the US (already started long before Trump, so it's not his accomplishment, and they won't be providing the jobs hoped for, but they'll keep migrating to the US)
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    This is basically how Southern Europe goverments work, but at continent scale. Hence why Nothern countries have such a hard time understanding why we usually have some issues caring to follow all regulations, and are somehow flexible in what to follow. We have been throughout this way of working across centuries. You could re-publish the famous Portuguese writer, Eça de Queiroz, books critizing the society from 19th century updated to a modern setting, and most of it would still apply.
poisonborz 1y ago
Like with all EU things, great idea, 10 years too late and half-assedly implemented
pjmlp 1y ago
If only US clouds would be the issue. This wouldn't do anything, while using US operating systems, programming languages, phone and watch devices.
- victorbjorklund 1y ago
  > programming languages How is a programming language an issue? Not sure even which programming language would count as a "US programming language" other than maybe Java. But even then the language itself shouldn't be an issue (maybe you could make the case for the runtime).
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Export regulations, take some time to read the licenses from corporation sponsored languages with SDKs on their company sites. Anything that isn't guided by ISO, ECMA, or an international foundation is at peril from goverments.
    - victorbjorklund 1y ago
      That sounds more like a problem for americans than for europeans
- tormeh 1y ago
  That's bizarre. Anything open source and locally run is fine, imo. Windows and Mac are pretty problematic, though. Same with all the security processors on modern chips.
LaurensBER 1y ago
Can confirm, there's increasing pressure from legal and compliance to map the risk and look into alternatives. For the cloud this is somewhat doable (we could run on Hetzner if we increased the team size) but for Microsoft/Apple there are zero alternative ofcourse so sofar it hasn't proceeded beyond a few risk_mapping.xls files.
- sam_lowry_ 1y ago
  From my sources at AWS I hear that pretty much all cloud migrations for EU institutions were lift-and-shift. So I guess you just don't have enough pressure to execute the down-to-earth migrations. The engineering culture in DIGIT is abysmal and outside of it, totally inexistent. This can also explain the lack of progress.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
    > From my sources at AWS I hear that pretty much all cloud migrations for EU institutions were lift-and-shift. This is in line with my experience, too. When asked why, they would usually mention 2 arguments: 1) additional work for not much extra value, 2) vendor lock-in.
    - sam_lowry_ 1y ago
      I am not affiliated with EU institutions, but followed their IT evolution for a while. Some 20+ years ago, their IT was fragmented but decent, pretty much on par with the private sector. But then DIGIT started the centralization efforts, and it squeezed life out of internal IT departments across institutions and directorates. DIGIT bought all of its Microsoft software from British crooks that defrauded the Post Office and were at the origin of the Horizon scandal . DIGIT created the infamous framework contracts system that still siphons funds to Greek and Italian mafia. DIGIT caught on Drupal quite early but managed to suck the soul of every Drupal developer that joined in. Once in a while the arrogance and ignorance of DIGIT management let beautiful things flourish under the carpet. For many years the EU tender system was the only big website that used XSLT for its original purpose of rendering XML into HTML on websites. What I am trying to say is that DIGIT has to be reformed and given clear operational instructions, e.g. no more cloud migrations and a 10-year period with checkpoints to bring everything back to earth. They should also decentralize and nourish proximity IT services. Also people responsible for money laundering, e.g. the individuals who signed the Fujitsu framework agreement or the European Dynamics framework agreement should be prosecuted. They may claim these agreements were legal, but let the courts decide.
cmenge 1y ago
From my experience with execs and especially politicians, their understanding of "cloud" is very much focused on the data centers / hardware, i.e. a bit of an "early cloud" understanding where the main idea is to 1) improve utilization and 2) turn capex into opex. In practice, "clouds" are more about the hundreds of battle-tested services that are trivial to deploy and easy to integrate. Want a K8s cluster? Sure, we'll give you a control plane for free. A few TB of storage? Here you go. A message queue? Done. Authorization between them? Sure, built-in. These services combined have probably billions of lines of code and have been used for things from the most trivial little fun app with almost no users to systems with massive load. That's what sets them apart and makes them so useful. The hyperscalers have probably invested multiple trillion dollars into their clouds by now, yet it seems the EU keeps believing a EUR 10m bureaucracy project will put them in the same league. And the biggest joke is: certain government projects force you into local providers whose software stack comes from ... Huawei... lol
- kuschku 1y ago
  > And the biggest joke is: certain government projects force you into local providers whose software stack comes from ... Huawei... lol Ah, I see you've also dealt with certain German Healthcare IT companies lol
  - cmenge 1y ago
    Haha lol yes indeed :)
mrtksn 1y ago
EU businesses aren't going to switch to EU providers as long as US providers are just as convenient and provide better services. EU providers aren't going to be as convenient and as good as US providers unless they can have similar levels of investment. They aren't going to get similar levels of investment as long as US providers are available and convenient. The IT stuff is a replication effort and replication makes sense only when the original isn't available. Russia and China got some good IT stuff only when the US stuff were restricted one way or another. So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.
- closewith 1y ago
  > So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations. I think you underestimate the deterioration that's already occurred. These conversations are already happening. It will take a decade at least, but it's already begun.
  - mrtksn 1y ago
    I'm aware of the state but it's not bad enough. It will be bad enough only when access to US services is just as restricted as in Russia and China. Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it. Why would anybody invest in European mass appeal e-mail provider when things can just improve if Trump changes his pills? As a result in Europe you can't have a Gmail but instead you get Proton Mail. This is cool but its a niche product. The same goes for everything, EU does have some great niche tech and some content studios but the platforms are always US based. I.e. one of the hottest games at this moment(clair obscur expedition 33) in the world is French made but it is primarily published on US platforms. On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more. Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets. Trump for some reason tries hard to change that but he hasn't succeeded yet but on the other hand he just started... So maybe in a few years it can happen after some huge scandal that justifies drastic changes. For example, it can be something like coordinated attack on Europeans by US tech giants and Russia etc. Musk with his actions in Ukraine propelled British and French satellite providers for example.
davedx 1y ago
Yup. This is one of the reasons I'm working on an EU-based PaaS. Ping me davedx@gmail.com if you'd be interested in kicking the tyres once it's ready for prime time.
- fjfaase 1y ago
  Are you being satirical using a Google email address? You do not have your own EU based domain with an EU email address?
  - davedx 1y ago
    Not being satirical no - I don't have any company infrastructure setup yet, I'm focused fully on building the product. The product is on a .eu domain, and @domain.eu mailboxes will eventually emerge :)
    - sam_lowry_ 1y ago
      Bert Hubert just wrote an article for you: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/yeah-it-is-on-youtube-linkedin/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/yeah-it-is-on-youtube-link... As a starter, you have no excuse.
      - davedx 1y ago
        Appreciate the candour.
simultsop 1y ago
EU did this long time ago, now they're doing it publicly. It sounded wrong back then, but turns out they were right.
kkfx 1y ago
Euro exec do not know IT basis enough to understand that the cloud is a deprecated paradigm some push for personal interests... Not at all the future. The future is interconnected desktops, thanks to FTTH, current hardware, photovoltaic with storage for the vast areas of the world where is meaningful and of course A/C. The future is FLOSS, decentralized, distributed for specific applications. Fog/edge computing admit that without telling, interested parties lobby against, but that's is.
bArray 1y ago
> The "The Digital Sovereignty Revolution" survey found 84 percent of UK IT leaders are now concerned that geopolitical developments could threaten their ability to access and control their data, and 61 percent of organizations say sovereignty is a strategic priority. The joke is that it's the UK government that actually want to snoop on the data, apparently in the name of child safety [1], the same people that have repeatedly failed to act on child safety right in front of them [2]. Bare in mind that the UK can just issue a TCN [3]: > Technical Capability Notices - TCNs – are secret orders that could compel any company in any jurisdiction, so long as they have sufficient connection to the UK, to make changes to their service to facilitate the UK's use of its investigatory powers. These changes could reduce the service's security, including by removing electronic protection (such as encryption). You can't even say it's not a real threat, because it just happened to Apple [4], which they tried to hold in complete secrecy [5]. Apple is struggling and have an almighty legal team and almost bottomless resources, your little UK company has no hope. I think that the article's framing is wrong about Trump and tariffs, and that de-clouding is more about getting off the hype-train and reducing costs. I suspect multiple companies realised that they don't need a thousand micro-services and that they can run comfortably from several bare metal servers. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-encryption-and-child-safety/end-to-end-encryption-and-child-safety https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-encryp... [2] https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-what-happened-what-inquiries-there-were-and-how-starmer-was-involved-after-elon-musks-accusations-13285021 https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-w... [3] https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5547/our-challenge-against-uks-secret-tcn-powers https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5547/our-challeng... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/uk-confronts-apple-with-demand-for-cloud-backdoor-to-users-encrypted-data https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/uk-confro... [5] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/investigatory-powers-tribunal-ipt-apple-rejects-secrecy-encryption-bare-details/ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/investigatory-powers-tr...

63 points by rcarmo 1y ago

jimbob45 1y ago

This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator Just a straight conflict of interest.

rapnie 1y ago
Here it is better to quote in context, though (italic mine): > This comes from research carried out by Civo, a UK-based cloud operator which undoubtedly has skin in the game, having campaigned against what it sees as unfair practices by the hyperscalers for some time. > Nevertheless, [..]
peterpost2 1y ago
That they have an self-interest does not necessarily mean that they don't have a point. It's obvious at this point that the American government should not be trusted with European governments data. Hell, you could even argue that the American government should not be trusted with the data of it's own citizens, them having let Doge and Elon Musk have had access to citizen information.
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
The problem with decrying any conflict of interest is that you end up having non-expert research by people who are not familiar with the field.

ManBeardPc 1y ago

Yes. We free ourselves from the US dependency by... letting Microsoft, Amazon and Google build them. I don't see anything changing, still more and more companies and projects are moving to the US cloud providers. There are discussions and worries but the conclusion is always the same: it's too expensive to move away or not moving to the cloud and there is no non-US alternative. Not generally true IMHO, but many companies are structured in a way that makes a good internal IT nearly impossible.

kristianc 1y ago
Yes - what this will mean in most if not nearly all situations is using a hyperscaler’s services in a data zone that you or your customers are more comfortable with, not switching off them wholesale.
spwa4 1y ago
This is how it always goes in the EU. "The US becomes less reliable/invests less/... so we'll do it and put in a BIG effort" big announcement from Brussels. Usually repeated 5 times or so by some head of state of France and/or Germany. Then you check the "BIG effort" the EU makes and it's, 10 years of 0 budget + 5% of the budget US invests yearly for 3 years + never looking at it again. To make it worse from that point, they mostly don't divide such budgets across a million small proposals like the US does. No, the politicians in the Brussels find 2 or 3 companies or institutions they like and sign a contract with them. Which results in the many (usually small) companies that actually have accomplishments not getting their business, but big consultancies or institutions or ... getting the contracts by promising to divide the business among pre-agreed subcontractors (doing the EU's job for them, or at least the administration/checking job the US government does in the US, and the subcontractors especially have to be in the right countries). Afterwards, they don't even check what was actually accomplished, and intervening is just unheard of. Meanwhile you look at it, and you're forced to conclude: 1) scientists will not be leaving the US under Trump. Yes the difference between the EU and US will become smaller, but still heavily in favor of the US (as in >100% difference, factors, not percentage points). In pay, in budget (ie. for research equipment), in infrastructure, in existing knowledge, and of course in future job prospects after research. Also: it's not just the US universities that are coming under increasing pressure. 2) the EU brain drain towards the US will continue in other sectors too (IT, medicine, pharma, ...) 3) cloud business will continue migrating to the US (whether we're talking Salesforce or AWS EC2) 4) factories will keep migrating to the US (already started long before Trump, so it's not his accomplishment, and they won't be providing the jobs hoped for, but they'll keep migrating to the US)
- pjmlp 1y ago
  This is basically how Southern Europe goverments work, but at continent scale. Hence why Nothern countries have such a hard time understanding why we usually have some issues caring to follow all regulations, and are somehow flexible in what to follow. We have been throughout this way of working across centuries. You could re-publish the famous Portuguese writer, Eça de Queiroz, books critizing the society from 19th century updated to a modern setting, and most of it would still apply.

poisonborz 1y ago

Like with all EU things, great idea, 10 years too late and half-assedly implemented

pjmlp 1y ago

If only US clouds would be the issue. This wouldn't do anything, while using US operating systems, programming languages, phone and watch devices.

victorbjorklund 1y ago
> programming languages How is a programming language an issue? Not sure even which programming language would count as a "US programming language" other than maybe Java. But even then the language itself shouldn't be an issue (maybe you could make the case for the runtime).
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Export regulations, take some time to read the licenses from corporation sponsored languages with SDKs on their company sites. Anything that isn't guided by ISO, ECMA, or an international foundation is at peril from goverments.
  - victorbjorklund 1y ago
    That sounds more like a problem for americans than for europeans
tormeh 1y ago
That's bizarre. Anything open source and locally run is fine, imo. Windows and Mac are pretty problematic, though. Same with all the security processors on modern chips.

LaurensBER 1y ago

Can confirm, there's increasing pressure from legal and compliance to map the risk and look into alternatives. For the cloud this is somewhat doable (we could run on Hetzner if we increased the team size) but for Microsoft/Apple there are zero alternative ofcourse so sofar it hasn't proceeded beyond a few risk_mapping.xls files.

sam_lowry_ 1y ago
From my sources at AWS I hear that pretty much all cloud migrations for EU institutions were lift-and-shift. So I guess you just don't have enough pressure to execute the down-to-earth migrations. The engineering culture in DIGIT is abysmal and outside of it, totally inexistent. This can also explain the lack of progress.
- dvfjsdhgfv 1y ago
  > From my sources at AWS I hear that pretty much all cloud migrations for EU institutions were lift-and-shift. This is in line with my experience, too. When asked why, they would usually mention 2 arguments: 1) additional work for not much extra value, 2) vendor lock-in.
  - sam_lowry_ 1y ago
    I am not affiliated with EU institutions, but followed their IT evolution for a while. Some 20+ years ago, their IT was fragmented but decent, pretty much on par with the private sector. But then DIGIT started the centralization efforts, and it squeezed life out of internal IT departments across institutions and directorates. DIGIT bought all of its Microsoft software from British crooks that defrauded the Post Office and were at the origin of the Horizon scandal . DIGIT created the infamous framework contracts system that still siphons funds to Greek and Italian mafia. DIGIT caught on Drupal quite early but managed to suck the soul of every Drupal developer that joined in. Once in a while the arrogance and ignorance of DIGIT management let beautiful things flourish under the carpet. For many years the EU tender system was the only big website that used XSLT for its original purpose of rendering XML into HTML on websites. What I am trying to say is that DIGIT has to be reformed and given clear operational instructions, e.g. no more cloud migrations and a 10-year period with checkpoints to bring everything back to earth. They should also decentralize and nourish proximity IT services. Also people responsible for money laundering, e.g. the individuals who signed the Fujitsu framework agreement or the European Dynamics framework agreement should be prosecuted. They may claim these agreements were legal, but let the courts decide.

cmenge 1y ago

From my experience with execs and especially politicians, their understanding of "cloud" is very much focused on the data centers / hardware, i.e. a bit of an "early cloud" understanding where the main idea is to 1) improve utilization and 2) turn capex into opex. In practice, "clouds" are more about the hundreds of battle-tested services that are trivial to deploy and easy to integrate. Want a K8s cluster? Sure, we'll give you a control plane for free. A few TB of storage? Here you go. A message queue? Done. Authorization between them? Sure, built-in. These services combined have probably billions of lines of code and have been used for things from the most trivial little fun app with almost no users to systems with massive load. That's what sets them apart and makes them so useful. The hyperscalers have probably invested multiple trillion dollars into their clouds by now, yet it seems the EU keeps believing a EUR 10m bureaucracy project will put them in the same league. And the biggest joke is: certain government projects force you into local providers whose software stack comes from ... Huawei... lol

kuschku 1y ago
> And the biggest joke is: certain government projects force you into local providers whose software stack comes from ... Huawei... lol Ah, I see you've also dealt with certain German Healthcare IT companies lol
- cmenge 1y ago
  Haha lol yes indeed :)

mrtksn 1y ago

EU businesses aren't going to switch to EU providers as long as US providers are just as convenient and provide better services. EU providers aren't going to be as convenient and as good as US providers unless they can have similar levels of investment. They aren't going to get similar levels of investment as long as US providers are available and convenient. The IT stuff is a replication effort and replication makes sense only when the original isn't available. Russia and China got some good IT stuff only when the US stuff were restricted one way or another. So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations.

closewith 1y ago
> So, IMHO the only hope for EU to have non-niche providers would be the complete deterioration of US-EU relations. I think you underestimate the deterioration that's already occurred. These conversations are already happening. It will take a decade at least, but it's already begun.
- mrtksn 1y ago
  I'm aware of the state but it's not bad enough. It will be bad enough only when access to US services is just as restricted as in Russia and China. Currently there aren't any restrictions, the political class is worried and people don't feel good about the maker of the products but that's it. Why would anybody invest in European mass appeal e-mail provider when things can just improve if Trump changes his pills? As a result in Europe you can't have a Gmail but instead you get Proton Mail. This is cool but its a niche product. The same goes for everything, EU does have some great niche tech and some content studios but the platforms are always US based. I.e. one of the hottest games at this moment(clair obscur expedition 33) in the world is French made but it is primarily published on US platforms. On Twitter you can find Euro tech boi's who will be repeating the same libertarian ideas as the US tech bros but the EU people make about as much as a successful restaurant and the US tech bros make often as much as a global restaurant chain or more. Europe, or any place will be stuck with niche small businesses as long as US has access to their markets. Trump for some reason tries hard to change that but he hasn't succeeded yet but on the other hand he just started... So maybe in a few years it can happen after some huge scandal that justifies drastic changes. For example, it can be something like coordinated attack on Europeans by US tech giants and Russia etc. Musk with his actions in Ukraine propelled British and French satellite providers for example.

davedx 1y ago

Yup. This is one of the reasons I'm working on an EU-based PaaS. Ping me davedx@gmail.com if you'd be interested in kicking the tyres once it's ready for prime time.

fjfaase 1y ago
Are you being satirical using a Google email address? You do not have your own EU based domain with an EU email address?
- davedx 1y ago
  Not being satirical no - I don't have any company infrastructure setup yet, I'm focused fully on building the product. The product is on a .eu domain, and @domain.eu mailboxes will eventually emerge :)
  - sam_lowry_ 1y ago
    Bert Hubert just wrote an article for you: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/yeah-it-is-on-youtube-linkedin/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/yeah-it-is-on-youtube-link... As a starter, you have no excuse.
    - davedx 1y ago
      Appreciate the candour.

simultsop 1y ago

EU did this long time ago, now they're doing it publicly. It sounded wrong back then, but turns out they were right.

kkfx 1y ago

Euro exec do not know IT basis enough to understand that the cloud is a deprecated paradigm some push for personal interests... Not at all the future. The future is interconnected desktops, thanks to FTTH, current hardware, photovoltaic with storage for the vast areas of the world where is meaningful and of course A/C. The future is FLOSS, decentralized, distributed for specific applications. Fog/edge computing admit that without telling, interested parties lobby against, but that's is.

bArray 1y ago

> The "The Digital Sovereignty Revolution" survey found 84 percent of UK IT leaders are now concerned that geopolitical developments could threaten their ability to access and control their data, and 61 percent of organizations say sovereignty is a strategic priority. The joke is that it's the UK government that actually want to snoop on the data, apparently in the name of child safety [1], the same people that have repeatedly failed to act on child safety right in front of them [2]. Bare in mind that the UK can just issue a TCN [3]: > Technical Capability Notices - TCNs – are secret orders that could compel any company in any jurisdiction, so long as they have sufficient connection to the UK, to make changes to their service to facilitate the UK's use of its investigatory powers. These changes could reduce the service's security, including by removing electronic protection (such as encryption). You can't even say it's not a real threat, because it just happened to Apple [4], which they tried to hold in complete secrecy [5]. Apple is struggling and have an almighty legal team and almost bottomless resources, your little UK company has no hope. I think that the article's framing is wrong about Trump and tariffs, and that de-clouding is more about getting off the hype-train and reducing costs. I suspect multiple companies realised that they don't need a thousand micro-services and that they can run comfortably from several bare metal servers. [1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-encryption-and-child-safety/end-to-end-encryption-and-child-safety https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/end-to-end-encryp... [2] https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-what-happened-what-inquiries-there-were-and-how-starmer-was-involved-after-elon-musks-accusations-13285021 https://news.sky.com/story/grooming-gangs-scandal-timeline-w... [3] https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5547/our-challenge-against-uks-secret-tcn-powers https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/5547/our-challeng... [4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/uk-confronts-apple-with-demand-for-cloud-backdoor-to-users-encrypted-data https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/07/uk-confro... [5] https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/investigatory-powers-tribunal-ipt-apple-rejects-secrecy-encryption-bare-details/ https://pressgazette.co.uk/media_law/investigatory-powers-tr...