The Edito
Is the state serious about protecting our data?
Since the Covid crisis, industrial sovereignty has become a matter of course. And yet, defending our sovereignty has been, and still is for some, seen in a negative light! However, while it has come back to the fore in the speeches, it’s hard to see the concrete achievements of this new awareness! Here, I’d like to focus once again on digital sovereignty, and once again we can ask ourselves whether the French state, which includes politicians but also and above all the administration, really takes to heart the defense of French citizens’ interests?
Let’s take a concrete example of sensitive data. You want to renew your national identity card, passport or vehicle registration document. You go through the Agence nationale des titres sécurisés (Link), and what do you find? The site’s server is based in the U.S. (and therefore subject to U.S. extra-territorial laws). Tasty, isn’t it?
As shown by the Apps GeoTool…
When we discover the sad reality, we can only wonder if there are people who think on anything other than a purely financial basis when it comes to choosing our hosting and digital infrastructures? This questioning is all the more worrying when it comes to the existence of any kind of digital sovereignty (although this can unfortunately be extrapolated to many other fields), when European Commissioner Thierry Breton takes France to task over its SREN law (Euractiv). Not to mention the so-called “sovereign cloud” initiatives in Europe, where the prospective supplier would be AWS (Amazon)… One really wonders whether, in the end, the European Union as it has become still serves the interests of its population and the states that make it up, or whether it serves the corrupt financial interests of a European administration and its commissioners, the first of whom continues to take initiatives that are outside the framework defined by the European treaties themselves, and therefore outside the democratic framework without anyone being moved by this, as long as it is to the advantage of the United States…
As a Frenchman, I can only find these drifts worrying at both European and national level. Do we pay taxes to have a state and public services that neglect the national interest and play against our interests as citizens?
