Hi!
In this interview with Adrienne Fichter, multiple award winning Swiss research journalist, we discussed the utter European dependency on US clouds (“we are data colonies”), and what this means for government communications.
From my own background within the Dutch secret service, I know that spying on email is a lot of work: you have to read all that stuff. It is hard enough to only read your own email! However, with AI, it is now becoming far easier for the US government to make sense of all that foreign language email. You can tell the AI for example to find all communications relevant to the F-35 procurement, and it will find and translate the right messages for you.
The interview is in German, but it translates well. You might find a few odd sentences about “female politicians” but that is due to German being challenging that way.
I want to highlight one painful sentence:
“Our governments are risking our security and independence, just so that they can continue to use Microsoft Outlook. This sounds ridiculous, but this is really what I observe politicians doing right now”
Do read the whole article!
Bert