I do agree blocking Palantir is a good move but the Spanish government is doing it for the wrong reason. Spain is storing all sort of data on Chinese servers, including their Intelligence, and Judicial wiretaps.
> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”
I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.
In addition to the more well-known stuff, China DDoSed Github because they were mad that two projects let Chinese citizens read non-propaganda news in 2015.
And Israel is attacking various countries - okay not in quite in Europe, but pretty close to the southeastern EU member states.
So you have one country which is in a very loose alliance with a country that's attacking a country around the periphery of the EU, and another country that's joined at the hip with a country that's attacking another country around the periphery of the EU, just slightly further away.
Don't be fooled. Israel is also attacking countries in Europe
They did when being caught messing with elections in Scotland, Europe, for example. Whom Europeans vote are none of the Israel business. And there is a reasonable suspicion that they were sending sex traps for decades to blackmail European elites, left and right. This is not how a real friend behave.
china has no political agenda outside of their country (that includes taiwan from their pov). all they care about is staying in power at home and keeping up the economy. they only sell to russia because its a good way to make money.
belt and road, deals with african dictators, selling cars and phones to europe, temu and alibaba, open source llms, all of that is for higher tax revenue. a lot of chinese companies are part state owned so thats another way it directly benefits the government.
even the illegal police stations only exist to make sure overseas chinese communities dont support opposition movements back home. is it a good thing? definitely not, but its also not a threat to the host country as a whole.
the spying they do is either economic espionage thats good for the world (trade secrets should not exist, thats what patents are for) or good old state on state action like everybody else is doing. i bet russia and america each have more spies in europe than china.
There is no reason for chinese elite overproduction other than to wage war by other means. They performed acts such as naval blockade of Australia as a show of force when such a thing was deemed necessary.
Europe is bled dry and will cease to exist rather soon if nothing chnages.
except for all of the hacking and industrial espionage, e.g. Salt Typhoon
let's be clear: MAGA is doing everything they can per Dugan-esque playbooks on how to destroy US-EU relations, but don't pretend for a second that China is some magical bastion of human rights or fair, competitive practices.
You are literally wrong, the data is stored in Spain on their servers and managed by their government. The risk as stated by EU and US is allowing Chineese nationals to *enter* the data storage facilities (direct quote from the article you shared).
Yes, it's still bad but they are not as stupid to just have their servers located in China for this.
It's expensive to home-grow your own solutions and if you try transitioning too many services at once the cost will be outrageous and you'll probably open other security holes. I am glad Spain is taking this step and I hope they continue this trend - but outright refusing to use any software built abroad requires a massive investment in domestic tech. That investment would likely pay economic dividends but it is a cost that needs to be measured against other investments Spain needs to make and in Spain's case resilience against global warming is especially important.
The original saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
I think an intellectually honest take is that it's advantageous and prudent to depend on allies and neighbors; leveraging each party's strengths for efficiencies over strategic autonomy. This trade-off is commonly debated with depending on US military hardware in favor of EU military hardware (e.g. France's long standing position for EU strategic autonomy), or vendor lock-in with AWS vs cloud-independent offerings.
The problem is when an ally becomes inconsistent and/or uncooperative; a high stakes version of prisoner's dilemma. At which point do you replace an ally's offerings with more expensive, and often inferior, alternatives? The general populace rarely has the appetite for the short-term economic pain required to achieve long-term strategic independence.
would be better to be on spanish servers, but decoupling from american tech remains a public good, especially if using american tech bans american competitors
> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”
I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.