The justices were concerned about the country’s practices regarding digital sovereignty. With purchasing policies, people still often ignore solutions from French companies.
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France has had the distinction of displaying the term “sovereignty” in front of its ministries for several years: there are four ministries in the current government (food, industry, energy and digital sovereignty).
However, for the digital realm, the Court of Auditors – which is primarily responsible for controlling the regularity and effectiveness of the use of public money and evaluating public policy – has just published a report that is concerned about the dependence of a country’s civil information system on foreign parties.
In our digitalized and highly connected world, full control over information systems is a requirement for the sovereign exercise of one’s activities. This is mainly due to the absence of regulating technology choices dictated to us by third parties and ensuring that sensitive data circulating in state information systems is protected.
For the United States alone, the judge identified three texts that would allow authorities in Washington to recover all the data of any citizen in France: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Section 702) which regulates the collection of data regarding non-US persons or entities overseas in the name of broad national security principles, Executive Order (Executive Order 12333) signed in 1981 by Ronald Reagan has since authorized mass data collection by intelligence agencies, and Cloud Law In 2018, which carried out the recovery by a judge of information contained in the storage service cloud (cloud computing) American companies around the world.
The court noted, to its regret, the existence of a dual phenomenon. On the one hand, governments often try to develop the applications they need internally. This often creates problems of budget control and adherence to production schedules.
On the other hand, state services tend to prioritize functionality and availability of market solutions, even if this means foregoing digital sovereignty by leveraging the catalogs of large international publishers.
A strategy that deprives national players of commercial outlets, and in fact prevents them from having references in the public sector to approach markets outside our borders.
This question of digital sovereignty goes beyond the technical dimension and therefore impacts on employment, taxation and public finances as well as on the capacity to control the sustainable functioning of state services. It’s enough to touch directly on each of our futures.
