In the Netherlands it came to light a lot of leaders are using private email because it is more easy to use than secure email.
This shows not a lot of leaders are aware of the security risks of using conventional communication.
This shows not a lot of leaders are aware of the security risks of using conventional communication.
Or rather, because it is more easy to circumvent requirements of public record and archival laws.
What I keep asking myself in any case... why is the European Union unable or unwilling to fund an open source software suite that covers all needs of a modern IT environment? For literally everything that's needed, there are open source solutions - Firefox and Thunderbird for communication, LibreOffice for office needs, AOSP for phones, Linux as an OS, Samba for managing PCs and laptops... that would be a real, tangible benefit for hundreds of millions of people, not to mention a huge saving in costs for software licenses.
They absolutely do care about stuff where ordinary people can save money, thanks to the EU we got a hard cap on CC fees (0.3%!) and free phone roaming EU-wide, for example.
Providing a basic computer software environment would save a lot of money for the population and especially it would also massively reduce electronic waste and lock-in effects. Windows 11 for example won't run on machines without TPMs enabled [1].
[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enable-tpm-2-0-o...
Reducing electronic waste is a key issue that the EU will need to tackle rather sooner than later. At the moment, Windows 11 won't run on old computers without TPM 2.0, which will render all PCs without one to either electronic waste or a constant security threat despite that the machines could otherwise run Linux perfectly fine - but no one outside of a bunch of nerds will run Linux on them because the software state of desktop Linux is just abysmal compared to the well-polished offerings of Apple and Microsoft.
Additionally, right now almost all economic and public activity depends on Microsoft to an unhealthy degree. We couldn't even get Microsoft to supply GDPR-compliant versions of MS Teams for schools during the pandemic, it's extremely hard to disable telemetry on anything Microsoft. Microsoft simply does whatever the fuck it wants and can get away with it, simply because there is no meaningful competition for anything they offer. And that dependency is extremely bad - just imagine the 45th coming back as the 47th in two years. The CoJ tore down two "agreements" for data transfer already because it cannot be assured that the US government does not steal our data (or worse, serve us malware) based on a secret NSL.
Europe needs independence, not just from Russia and China where it's long overdue, but also from the US.
They are actually funding and working on it: https://ec.europa.eu/info/departments/informatics/open-sourc...
For a modern IT environment used by a business, such a system is absolutely necessary