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.
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-huawei-contract-judici...
That is rather disturbing but this had me lol:
> 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.
> I do agree blocking Palantir is a good move
Why? I'm not an expert and have only googled a bit, but I can't figure out what the specific objection to Palantir is.
I think in general people are a bit distrusting of a tech firm headed by billionaires with deep political ties that sells AI driven surveillance state technology to governments
As opposed to what? American servers with Isreali backdoors?
How about Spanish servers?
I will never understand this helplessness that comes from these European countries. They are choosing to be dependent on foreign powers.
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.
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> In political science, the term banana republic describes a politically and economically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the export of natural resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic
What natural resource export is Spain’s economy dependent upon?
I don't have any insight into what to call it right now, but I thought for several decades after WWII it was still fascist? If anything being a banana republic might not be as as bad as what it used to be
i knew it was a little while after WWII (college history was long, long ago!) but didn't realize it was ... 1975-1977!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_transition_to_democrac...
I did a whole Wikipedia deep dive on this several months ago. I vaguely remembered hearing how long it took for it to switch back, but the history around it is kind of fascinating; the son of the previous king was groomed to be the successor of Francisco Franco, and I guess he did a good enough job convincing him that he was ideologically in agreement so that the power was passed to him, which he then used to reinstate a republican form of government.
If the data is encrypted before the upload I see no problem
Huawei is the complete data custodian. They are the ones doing the encrypting.
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