The French gov learned that lesson in July last year, when the director of public and legal affairs for Microsoft France, Anton Carniaux, was asked to testify before the French Senate whether he could guarantee that the data of French citizens stored in Microsoft's Azure servers, **in France**, is safe from access by US statecraft.
He replied that he cannot.
2/2
I'll break my n/n to add that we need to understand & remember the US would never, ever accept having its public/edu/mil/gov sectors hosted on foreign owned infra, lest of all abroad. Even that of a close ally.
Meanwhile, most of us, in some way, are taxed peasantry in the infrastructural equivalent of the Roman Empire, where the US gets to have its sovereignty and eat it too (at least the corporate Maxim of it), while the rest of the world does not.
This is an abject 'normal'.
Nov 3, 2026, 6:23 AM@JulianOliver
This reminds me of the Galileo satellite initiative that ended up being absorbed by the US GPS array in return for some intel crumbs from the empire. EU have a serf mentality.
@zvinj Yes, a good reference and example!
@zvinj this is absolute bullshit. Care to explain how Galileo got “absorbed”?
Nov 3, 2026, 8:10 AMAccording to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(Satellitennavigation), Galileo is still mostly independent from GPS/NAVSTAR and operated by ESA. China, India and some other countries are partners, while UK lost access rights due to the Brexit.
You might refer to an agreement with USA that Galileo’s signal must be “jammable” by the same means as GPS, which contradicts the original intent of a reliable, independent EU system.
@fiee @bert_hubert @zvinj I thought they were referring to negotiations around US gov wanting access to PRS, which seemed unimaginable at the time. As I understood it they became a 'partner country', but perhaps that didn't hold up after all.
@JulianOliver "US would never, ever accept having its public/edu/mil/gov sectors hosted on foreign owned infra, lest of all abroad. Even that of a close ally."
I like the thread, but you make a kinda big mistake here. True that FedRAMP High or DoD IL5 doesn't exist (yet) on foreign soil. I've had to deal with this many times over.
However, that's more a novelty exception than any kind of rule. Every single overseas base and embassy runs on host-nation telecom and power. Just look at DISA's Stuttgart office buying commercial leased circuits for Wiesbaden and Ramstein from the German carriers.
I could give a huge long list of the US depending on foreign soil and infrastructure but the point here should be something else.
Google (like Oracle) has swung hard into being a US military/intelligence contractor, meaning a front for Israeli intelligence, operations in Tel Aviv. Look up Unit 81 (I know them personally and I wouldn't give them the time of day let alone a state document). No joke, Merz is outclassed and played like a fool, as Germany foolishly hands national secrets to Israel.
@flyingpenguin Fair point. Perhaps I ought to have been clearer, 'server and PaaS/cloud infrastructure' .
For sure you can scrape L2/L3 on the wire, and yes carriers are a big part of sigint picture, but nonetheless that's skinny pickings next to the bounty of vast storage clusters of actual intelligence data, esp in this era. Arguably incomparable I reckon.
@flyingpenguin Interesting what you mention as to Israel. Even further, the US republicans want a weak EU. Google, heck the whole GAFAM, is their inside man.
@JulianOliver right. and when you say republicans, I assume you mean GRU assets.
@JulianOliver the google cloud defense contractors who ask me to help seem to be rushing into robotic/drone systems, meaning the US would have a privatized (unaccountable) kill switch in NATO intel/defense. similar to how Musk single-handedly turned off Ukrainian defenses to enable Russia to bomb civilians.
@JulianOliver realpolitik. - and now what?
@JulianOliver And the Cloud Act is, after all, just one part of the “underground empire” that can strike at any moment, as the ICC is currently experiencing, for example.
@JulianOliver Merz is lying. Not misunderstanding.
Nov 4, 2026, 3:51 AM@JulianOliver There is a reason my Mastodon account is hosted on a server in Germany. Probably doesn’t buy me much privacy on a public forum, but I still prefer it. And I’m a US citizen by birth.
Of course, if German political leadership is this clueless . . .
@ArtGeek Yes, the two instances I sysadmin are also in DE. Alas I've not moved my own from Mastodon.Social since it moved out of the EU. But yep, no E2EE with Mastodon, so best to message using a more secure channel regardless!
Nov 3, 2026, 4:08 PM@JulianOliver And even here in Belgium schools are pretending to be safe by using Microsoft because they have servers in the EU. They just don’t listen do they?
@TomDB Apparently not. Perhaps a way of explaining it to them, is that a Microsoft Azure data center in an EU member state is as 'European' as the US Embassy in Brussels.