Digital vassals? French Government ‘exposes citizens’ data to US'

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Core issue: Microsoft, US law, and French data

  • Senate hearing excerpt shows Microsoft France cannot guarantee French citizen data won’t be handed to US authorities without French consent; many see this as confirmation of long‑understood CLOUD Act–style risks.
  • Commenters connect this to repeated CJEU rulings (Schrems I/II) vs recurring EU–US “adequacy” deals, calling the situation legally and politically untenable.
  • Some highlight EU hypocrisy: the Commission sues its own data‑protection authority over MS365 and tolerates “consent or pay” tracking walls.

Why governments stay with Microsoft / US cloud

  • Strong theme: inertia and self‑protection in public IT, not cost or efficiency. Staff “only know Microsoft,” don’t want to learn alternatives, and can blame vendors when things fail.
  • Anecdotes from French, German, Dutch and other public bodies: deliberate sabotage of migrations, multi‑year OS upgrades, RFPs written for “Outlook licences” instead of generic email.
  • Union agreements, certifications, low public‑sector pay, and political risk (being blamed if a migration fails) all lock in the status quo.

Alternatives, migrations, and feasibility

  • Debate over replacing tools like SAS with R/Python:
    • Pro: SAS is expensive, obsolete, career‑limiting and non‑sovereign; small divisions could switch over 1–2 years.
    • Contra: you can’t trivially replace a large, integrated stats platform with “a bunch of scripts”; migrations are risky and often don’t save money.
  • Suggestions: EU‑wide public business‑software agency; sovereign clouds; government‑backed OSS stacks (Nextcloud/OnlyOffice, French docs.numerique.gouv.fr).
  • Skeptics note that even OSS (Python, R, Linux) is heavily US‑influenced, and that replacing Microsoft with Google doesn’t solve sovereignty.

Digital sovereignty, hardware, and geopolitics

  • Broad agreement that real sovereignty requires a strong domestic software/hardware ecosystem; many say Europe “dropped the ball” since the 1960s.
  • Long subthread argues EU semiconductor and cloud ecosystems are far behind US/Asia, with key tooling, fabs, packaging and capital largely outside Europe.
  • Some insist the EU could still build capability if it really chose to; others argue the ecosystem is so hollowed out that only niche “leapfrog” areas remain.
  • Proposals for an EU “Great Firewall” or hard requirements for EU‑controlled subsidiaries provoke pushback: political fragmentation, dependence on US FDI, and lack of credible domestic alternatives make hard decoupling unlikely.

Data minimization and structural exposure

  • A few argue the neglected lever is simply collecting less data; even perfectly “sovereign” storage can be abused or breached.
  • Others note that once control structurally flows through platforms and clouds, “sovereignty” risks becoming a comforting illusion unless both dependence and data volume are reduced.