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Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
- hunglee2 4mo agoOne understated outcome of Trump 2.0 is waking up some sections of the European intelligentsia to the risk of dependency on the United States. Trump 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
- Braxton1980 4mo agoBecause Trump has 2.5 years left and they may be hoping a Democrat wins
- usrnm 4mo agoTrump was elected. Twice. It was not a fluke, not a once in a lifetime event, he's a symptom of wider processes happening in the US. The world has changed and the old order is not coming back
- captainbland 4mo agoTrump is one thing but the overall dynamic of similar politicians gaining footholds across the world is what worries me. If everyone is X nation first in the same way, you lose the ability to negotiate with compromises, people want to start expanding their borders and that just escalates into war. We're already seeing that in a few cases but it just stands to get worse if this carries on.
- QuesnayJr 4mo agoHalf the countries in Europe has their own Trump-equivalent politician heading one of the largest parties, and yet Europeans are imagining it's something happening "in the US" while they sleepwalk into disaster.
- pjc50 4mo agoYes, and: these are the same picture. They're all promoted by Russian-backed influencers on US-owned social media, or indigenous US racists. We've got Elon inciting race riots in Belfast now; several people left homeless after they were firebombed out. A lot of this was laundered through Hungary: https://www.politico.eu/article/hungary-viktor-orban-favorite-brussels-think-tank-down-not-out-conservative-euroskeptic/ 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.
- saulapremium 4mo agoI am European and I am all too aware that the trend exists here as well. I am just hoping that a majority will now be able to see what disasters that road can lead to.
- tiahura 4mo agoMostly it’s a symptom of Democrats nominating the two most unliked people in politics.
- preg_match 4mo agoWhen the choices are “unlikable person” and “straight up agent of chaos set on destroying the US in every way he can” and you choose the latter, that’s on you. 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.
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- graemep 4mo agoDoes it matter who is president? The US was spying on European leaders before Trump's first term: "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-spied-merkel-other-top-european-officials-through-danish-2021-05-30/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...
- Paradigma11 4mo agoEverybody always spies on everybody else. Even it only to check what they are really thinking.
- graemep 4mo agoThat is all the more reason for governments not to rely on foreign suppliers.
- gib444 4mo ago> basically took no action allowing the US to further extend its dominance. 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
- tiahura 4mo agoIt’s a mismatch we’ve been asking Europe to do something about for 30+ years. Instead, they decided to turn their countries into third world refugee camps.
- hunglee2 4mo agoyeah true. Still, the primary problem was lack of consciousness about this state of affairs, especially at leadership level. One thing Trump 2.0 does take off the mask on this. It's a start
- andy_ppp 4mo agoIs anyone building (open source?) G-Suite - I’m honestly tired of paying Google money and I think everyone needs independence.
- dotcoma 4mo agoWhere and how will you host your email service, for example?
- rgblambda 4mo agoSomething like nextcloud.com? It's appeared on HN a few times. Some European governments and municipalities have switched to it.
- valanha 4mo agoNextcloud+self hosted email
- pedro_caetano 4mo agoNot exactly free as in free beer but Collabora, and their 'Collabora Online' suite fits your description. It's effectively online hosted libre office with a few extras.
- brador 4mo agoNo one made the easy pickings of Facebook clone, Reddit clone or Twitter clone for insane profits. You really think someone will make a gsuite? The person making project X days are over. The energy and drive is extinguished from humanity. Ambition is all that’s left.
- andy_ppp 4mo agoThese things go in cycles, we’ll be back - or potentially something better will come along.
- FinnKuhn 4mo agoFacebook made a Twitter (now X) clone (Threads) and has reportedly more users than X now [1]. They have also started a Reddit clone as well now (Forum)[2]. Not sure if that one will be a success as well though, as Reddit isn't loosing users like X is. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-daily-mobile-users-new-data-shows/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/18/threads-edges-out-x-in-dai... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/meta-quietly-launches-a-new-reddit-like-app-called-forum/ https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/22/meta-quietly-launches-a-ne...
- dre440 4mo agoThe irony that it is data from civil servants that wan to implement the biggest central digital censorship endeavor in the western hemisphere.
- touwer 4mo agoAh, yes. Sure. Proof?
- la_oveja 4mo agothe danish were one of the strongest Chat Control promovers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chat_Control
- dgellow 4mo agoSo, completely different country
- rgblambda 4mo agoDutch and Danish are two different nationalities. To be fair they both begin with a D and end with a H so I understand the confusion.
- robin_reala 4mo agoThat’s a very generous understanding.
- vlabakje90 4mo agoAnd neither are in the Western hemisphere.
- mcv 4mo agoYou mean these specific Danish EU civil servants were the ones pushing chat control? Or are we actually talking about completely different people? Not every European is the same person.
- 4mo ago
- postepowanieadm 4mo agoThey have been doing it for years? ECHELON isn't exactly new. Also, recent EU and UK actions are not exactly privacy friendly.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- themaninthedark 4mo agoSo they aren't one of the Five Eyes, they joined later... https://tuta.com/blog/fourteen-eyes-countries 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-european-five-eyes/ https://www.politico.eu/article/new-dutch-government-floats-...
- seydor 4mo agoDigital sovereignity is not enough. You need to get electronic communications completely off the internet.
- m4rkuskk 4mo agoI was trying to read the article, but those animations kept distracting me.
- fsflover 4mo agoUse NoScript. Worked like a charm.
- jdw64 4mo agoIt seems similar conversations are happening in Europe as well. Originally, Korea is a country where the 'pro US faction' (the faction that believes Korea should be subordinate to the US) is very strong by default. The US had a very strong influence on the establishment of the Korean government, and if you look back at Korea's history, it has always been about finding a country to serve. It feels like siding with the strongest power. In fact, the pro US faction is very strong, but there has also been a strong flow of security, bureaucratic, and economic elites who have justified dependence on the US as a national survival strategy. 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.
- robin_reala 4mo agoI have never seen anti American sentiment this bad Bad is subjective?
- jdw64 4mo agoI am speaking based on the response criteria of Korea's largest research institution.[1] https://kbthink.com/news-list/view.html?newsId=20260116115432221 https://kbthink.com/news-list/view.html?newsId=2026011611543...
- vrganj 4mo agoNah, you misunderstood. He was saying that the label bad for anti-americanism was subjective. Given their behaviour, some might see anti-americanism as justified or even good.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoThis is entirely the wrong lesson to take from this. Why are we still using a plaintext protocol in this day and age? Why can we not get an E2EE addition to the email protocol with full backwards compatibility? 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.
- laughing_man 4mo agoGetting from here to there is going to be tough, but I agree 100%. Not only should email be E2EE, but it should include a certificate scheme such that you know the person purporting to be the sender is actually the sender.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoGiven that the cryptography would necessarily be asymmetric verifying the sender on a TOFU basis seems like a trivial addition (just sign something). I doubt you can do better than TOFU though unless you tie it to an external ID system (corporate or government or etc issued hardware tokens or similar).
- wvh 4mo agoPGP had the right idea, but the system is too hard for the average person. With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.
- fsflover 4mo agoHow about the metadata? Perhaps if you mean something like self-hosted Matrix, then I agree.
- reacharavindh 4mo agoThe fact that government agencies, particularly those that deal with international concerns like these are using non sovereign tech for communications is mind-blowing. They might as well use public gmail.. atleast it would be cheaper. If you want it not exposed directly, host it yourself and take measures to secure it for intended eyes only. This should be common sense.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoIt's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top. 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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nl https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nl
- closewith 4mo agoThat's the most common approach globally. Like most countries, the Dutch Government use .gov.nl.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoAh. Just a blatant inaccuracy on wikipedia I take it. That does make a bit more sense.
- robin_reala 4mo agoYep. gov.nl is in the PSL[1] and there are plenty of used subdomains (e.g. https://business.gov.nl/ https://business.gov.nl/) [1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
- djaro 4mo ago
- attila-lendvai 4mo agoyes, digital sovereignity of the individual.
- sam_lowry_ 4mo agoIn the meantime Belgian public sector will use Google Cloud, it seems: https://ittech-pulse.com/news/smals-partners-with-google-cloud-to-modernize-public-sector-services-in-belgium/ https://ittech-pulse.com/news/smals-partners-with-google-clo...
- dotcoma 4mo agobonkers
- Avalaxy 4mo agoThat's not the case. Smals will use it, that doesn't mean that the rest of the public sector has to follow.
- sam_lowry_ 4mo agoThe tender was about R&D, the press release is about replacing the federal cloud, if you read between the words.
- mcv 4mo agoThe EU should fine such intentional violations with a billion euros per violation. That would stop this immediately and force cloud providers to split off their European side into separate companies that don't fall under US law.
- nickpp 4mo agoThe EU is trying relentlessly to read our IMs though.
- rgblambda 4mo agoThat's a separate problem. 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.
- mcv 4mo agoChat Control is not law. Of course there are some people inside the EU pushing for privacy violation, just like there are everywhere else, but it's not law. For now, the law protects privacy, and Microsoft violated it. That is the issue at hand.
- jonathanstrange 4mo agoUS companies cannot comply with the GDPR because of the CLOUD Act. The two frameworks are fundamentally in conflict with each other and it seems to me that everybody in the EU knows about it, yet this is somehow swept under the carpet and ignored even by government authorities. I've always wondered why this is so and how these kind of dependencies could be allowed in the first place. It's even worse for AI use than it is for productivity suits and email.
- robin_reala 4mo agoRoll on Schrems III.
- c16 4mo agoWith DigiID, as with this, I never understood why countries give critical infrastructure contracts away from the country it directly impacts, provided they have a mature tech ecosystem. I thought the whole point was that it was critical?
- sam_lowry_ 4mo agoBecause politicians hate depending on their engineers so much that they are willing to risk high treason charges instead?
- pepperoni_pizza 4mo agoNobody is getting charged for this in any way.
- sam_lowry_ 4mo agoNot yet )
- cookiengineer 4mo agoI kinda like where you are going with this. 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.
- sam_lowry_ 4mo agoProgress advances one death at a time. As new, younger judges are sworn it, the situation will change in the coming years.
- hinata08 4mo agowe never have evidence that providers bribe politicians into signing juicy contracts so I wouldn't claim they do, but it's either that or they're extremely gullible and don't care about their jobs. consider Hanlon's razor before being mad and sending everyone to court for treason Either ways, something needs to change
- coretx 4mo agoNot the US but the Dutch state is the problem here. The powers that be know that US espionage is not only limited to some emails and also entails sophisticated industrial espionage and never cared. Now "suddenly" they want to do something about it. This is Not about Dutch interests / sovereignty - we need to find out what it really is about.
- EdiX 4mo agoWe've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen. 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.
- graemep 4mo agoDownvotes for stating a reasonable, and probably correct argument. 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.
- lava_pidgeon 4mo ago"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." I disagree on this broad statement.
- graemep 4mo agoWhy? I see statements like this as evidence of denial - the same with the downvotes. No real counter argument, no evidence, just - "you are wrong". 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.
- saulapremium 4mo ago>No real counter argument, no evidence, just - "you are wrong". 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.
- networked 4mo ago> That is exactly where digital sovereignty begins. It is not a patriotic slogan, nor a storage-location promise. It is the practical question of who can compel access, who can audit the chain of custody, and who can deny or limit disclosure when another jurisdiction asks for the keys. Please at least try to make your LLM write better. It can! You can start by giving it https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md.
- eunos 4mo agoWhat's the point of this when The Netherland, among some other EU countries is already all in into eternal Atlanticism.
- beloch 4mo agoIf a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data. 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.
- kubb 4mo agoYou could take your analogy further, and consider why the Swiss banking isn’t so opaque anymore. Hint: people who did really inhuman things used that system to store their profits, and the Swiss society, developed and stable as it is, decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore.
- beloch 4mo agoThe Swiss didn't vet their clients. If Vladimir Putin wants to contract a data centre on your soil for the privacy, you can always have regulations that say, "No.".
- AnthonyMouse 4mo agoThe entire premise of "other countries can trust your companies to protect their privacy" is that you can't. "US reads Dutch emails" is the thing you have to not do.
- dmurray 4mo agoYou can be strict about who you do business with while still respecting their privacy once they are set up. 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.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo agoEurope and many other nations will look back on the early 21st century and wonder how they ever thought it was a good idea to willingly give up so much soverignity to foreign powers
- apexalpha 4mo agoEurope was beaten down, broke and simply kaput. 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.
- RetroTechie 4mo agoTo be fair: the # of wars fought between European nations... many. This goes back way further than WWII or Cold War. But yes both US and Russia (perhaps China too) might stand to gain from Europe staying divided as it is.
- gib444 4mo agoWell the history is more complex than that - let's not rewrite it. The US bossed around and bullied large parts of Europe for decades (and still does). Often we did not have a choice (or, siding with the US was the least-bad option)
- Cider9986 4mo agoEncryption is what's important, jurisdiction gives a false sense of security. Nobody should prefer their messenger be server-side encrypted in Iceland rather than e2ee in China. 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.
- reactordev 4mo agoPoliticians LOVE theatre
- Cider9986 4mo agoRemoved that to be less extreme.
- Daffrin 4mo ago[flagged]
- cryo32 4mo agoThis should kill Office 365 instantly globally.
- hinata08 4mo agothese scandals happen every other day 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
- p0w3n3d 4mo agoPlease give me all the data I promise I won't look into them. Unless this is about kids. Or terrorism. In fact, I might look into the data without telling you, because fsck /dev/hdu
- hinata08 4mo agothey never promised they won't look into them, they just suggest it 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-cloud-compute/4-describe-shared-responsibility-model 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.) "
- iamnothere 4mo agoI don’t understand the problem? If you’re not doing anything wrong, there shouldn’t be anything to hide, right? What’s the big deal? Besides, it’s not like you have any privacy anyway. (Am I doing this right?)
- thisislife2 4mo agoAnyone can read your email if it passes through their servers - it's the biggest drawback of email as it is unencrypted. So switching email services (or rolling out your own mail servers) isn't enough. You also need to control how it is delivered (i.e. control the networks / servers it goes through). With the US also treating encryption as a munition with export restrictions, it is also safe to assume that they can already crack any existing encryptions available in the market right now.
- ElFitz 4mo agoI think it’s not the first time the US has used that sort of interpretation of the law. There’s this one[^0] but also, I believe, an older case, also involving Microsoft, about data in Ireland. But I can’t find it. [0]: https://hackernoon.com/the-factors-prompting-a-judge-to-issue-warrants-for-microsoft-data-stored-in-ireland https://hackernoon.com/the-factors-prompting-a-judge-to-issu...