[Analysis] Mass Surveillance and the Data Wars
Nothing but the corruption of Europe’s elites and the absence of strategic foresight can account for such submission to the United States.
Part One
For thirty years, access to personal data has been a battlefield where Europe and the United States have clashed — with unequal weapons. Or rather, “unequal” is putting it mildly. The reality is that, once again, the European Union has proven to be a source of immense weakness — a machine for neutralizing power. Which, in fact, is exactly what America’s great postwar strategists — George Marshall, George Ball and their peers — designed the EU to be, and what their European laquais — Monnet, Schuman, Spaak, De Gasperi, Delors, Prodi, Barroso, Draghi, von der Leyen, Trichet, Lamy, Moscovici, Lagarde, and others — eagerly turned into reality, against the will of the peoples of Europe.
The creation in 1952 — two years after NATO and one year after the Mutual Security Act — of the European Coal and Steel Community was meant to prevent Europeans from buying high-quality, low-cost coal from the Warsaw Pact. The goal was to keep Europe’s steel industry from rising from the ashes and competing with America’s. Replace “coal” with “Russian gas,” and you’ll grasp the primary motive behind the U.S. provocation of the war in Ukraine.
One can hardly fault the Americans for being consistent in defending their interests — which, in Europe, have essentially amounted to plunder since the end of the First World War. But one can and should hold European leaders accountable — even in court — for failing to defend their own nations’ interests.
When it comes to data, the Americans face a massive problem: they lack unified, structured databases like those in Europe. And we’re not talking about the data harvested by Big Tech, whose value is negligible compared to, say, the data generated by France’s Carte Vitale since 1998. France is the only country in the world with thirty years of comprehensive health data covering its entire population — all linked to the social security number, the first three digits of which indicate sex and year of birth. And what has the French state done? Entrusted its management to Microsoft. That’s worse than Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to sell off part of France’s gold reserves at a bargain price.
The French military, too, has been forced to use Microsoft products — thus compelled to build their own add-ons and security layers to erradicate Microsoft’s backdoors and significant security flaws — even though France has one of the most advanced cyber law enforcement agency in the world: the Gendarmerie nationale, which has, for thirty years, relied exclusively on open-source systems and software.
Take a look at the strikingly poor quality of U.S. crime data and the FBI and Department of Justice’s inability to consolidate it, and you’ll understand the scale of the problem that drove Elon Musk mad. In 2021, for example, fewer than 65% of local police departments submitted complete data to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), leaving a gaping hole in national statistics. Health data, meanwhile, belongs to private insurance companies — all locked in captive networks — making access both difficult and costly.
Now consider this fact: nearly 80% of computers used by the U.S. federal government are obsolete — more than five years old — and the replacement cycle itself is currently five years long. The United States, a hyper–high-tech nation? A myth.
Our colleague Marc Endeweld recently published an excellent piece detailing the incompetence of European institutions — institutions that seem determined to place us firmly under American control, even though Europe, in many respects, is more advanced than the United States. The data war is only beginning, but in Brussels, the priority remains the censorship of citizens.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) — a bureaucratic monstrosity designed to police speech — was conceived by the American Democrats, originally under the Obama administration, with one very specific goal: to bypass the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by outsourcing censorship of American citizens to Europe. For further detail, we refer readers to the Twitter Files France report written by Thomas Fazi and myself.
This also explains why the DSA is so ineffective: every EU member state already had the tools to censor its own population, mechanisms that were built into the 2000 E-Commerce Directive. Implementing the DSA is a delusional — unless it’s used for targeted censorship of specific, pre-selected individuals or organizations. But even that would ultimately be decided by the courts, not by so-called “trusted third parties” or national Digital Services Coordinator, since the use of digital platforms is governed by consumer law for individuals and commercial law for businesses.
We have just seen two recent examples demonstrating that French judges will adhere to the strictest framework regarding freedom of expression, which remains the golden standard. Only clearly illegal infringements, supported by evidence, can justify censorship.
Then there’s the so-called Big Tech tax, a ridiculous measure born out of Brussels’ and Europe’s capitals’ refusal to confront the Dutch, Belgians, Luxembourgers — the Benelux countries, forever the Trojan Horse of Europe — and the Irish. Only their national tax schemes make large-scale tax optimization possible, a practice from which European multinationals are the main beneficiaries.
As for Donald Trump’s tariff threats, they would be easy to neutralize. The EU could simply impose capital controls at its borders, extending the trade war to the American financial industry. Everything would grind to a halt the moment U.S. investment funds ans banks — all fueled by the Federal Reserve’s money-printing machine — were forced to seek authorization from each of the EU’s 27 central banks before repatriating capital, dividends, or profits.
But that would require political courage — a quality Europe’s elites sorely lack. Above all, it would demand a definitive break from neoliberal ideology. One might as well ask a duck to bark.
The European Union, which long ago ceased to harmonize and now simply imposes uniformity remains, let it be said again, a profound source of weakness. The supposed benefits of the common market — non-existent, as our colleague Thomas Fazi demonstrates in a detailed four-part essay — do nothing to offset it.
Had the EU’s member states been allowed to decide their own policies on personal data — while coordinating them, as was done with health insurance systems — the Americans would have quickly found themselves at a disadvantage. It’s far harder to impose one’s standards on 27 independent countries than through the single supranational bureaucratic behemoth the EU has become.
And now here you are, frustrated because your computer can’t upgrade to Windows 11, lacking the infamous Trusted Platform Module (TPM) — a security chip embedded in the motherboard that stores encryption keys, credentials, and other sensitive data. If Microsoft insists on enforcing its security standards across all PCs — just as it imposed its first operating system, MS-DOS, back in the late 1970s — it’s not to protect your computer. It’s to control it, to lock in a steady revenue stream by selling you licenses, subscriptions, and the privilege of being surveilled while your data is monetized.
But don’t panic — and whatever you do, don’t buy a new computer. Simply install a Linux distribution such as Linux Mint. Not only will that extend your computer’s lifespan by at least five years, but for everyday tasks — office work, web browsing, gaming — you won’t notice the difference. You’ll have a system that’s more stable, more secure, and that doesn’t spy on you (no data collection whatsoever). You’ll enjoy better-quality software than Microsoft’s (better than Office 365). It won’t cost you a cent — and you’ll have the satisfaction of flipping a very large, metaphorical middle finger to Bill Gates.
What more could you ask for?
The Data Mania
Thomas Fazi and I laid out, in our report on the Twitter Files France, the roots of the paranoid, panoptic obsession that is mass surveillance. It is the fixation of a virtual caste that mistakes the map for the territory, the portrait for the person, suffering from a psychosis whose most delusional symptom is the belief that terrorism or international drug trafficking can be defeated through the mere collection and analysis of data.
Terrorism and narcotics trafficking are fought first and foremost through human intelligence — there is no policing without informants — through investigation, and through border control, all of which are tangible, real-world activities. Data analysis serves only as a complementary tool, occasionally useful for targeting or providing technical evidence — assuming, of course, that one can even manage to attribute communications to actual individuals.