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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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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’s crazy, I hope electronic voting is never allowed in Portuguese elections.
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