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Content archived on 2023-04-17

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EU FOREIGN TECHNOLOGIES DEPENDENCY CRISIS: RESEARCH PROJECT SEEKS SOLUTIONS AND NEW POLICIES

The Member States of the European Union as well as many countries in Latin America and Asia have never been more dependent on technologies and data storage infrastructure from foreign states. This state of affairs has been described as a major security threat to the Member States of the European Union. A newly-started research project and call for research cooperation among the EU member states and Latin America is now among the first to address this very serious challenge.

Digital Economy icon Digital Economy
Security icon Security
Fundamental Research icon Fundamental Research

The EU Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology took a clear stance last summer regarding the current foreign technologies dependence crisis facing the EU member states. The resulting memo was leaked to Bloomberg and revealed that CNECT (shorthand for the Directorate-General) is finally sounding the alarm in an official capacity. The EU foreign technologies dependency crisis is a growing and real threat which not only effects domestic industries and infrastructure in the various member states; but also directly determines the status of corporate trade secrets and non-public government information throughout the entire EU. The privacy of more than half a billion EU citizens is also profoundly influenced by this dependency. With previous experience in creating research networks on a global scale, technology and innovation policy researcher Gunnar K. A. Njalsson is now determined to work toward finding solutions to the current EU and Latin American dependency on big tech located in foreign jurisdictions whose interests often compete with those of the countries whose data they collect. Njalsson is concerned that nothing is being done and no real solutions are being proposed to a crisis which could ultimately cost EU governments and private industry tens of billions of euros in losses and give rise to legal problems which one can at present only speculate about. "Hardly two decades ago, the security of national infrastructure and data assets was taken for granted in most Member States of the European Union. One didn't have to remind the security services or the public sector of the need to keep trade secrets, citizens' personal information or important national technologies under the jurisdiction and control of the country in question. All of that seems to be forgotten now in a temporary state of chaos where adopted technologies such as "cloud technologies" have outpaced the ability of national policies and legislation to foresee economic and legal dangers," says Gunnar K. A. Njalsson who is commencing a call for research partners based within the EU and Latin America. The new project bears the title "Bringing Control of Vital Technological Infrastructure Back Home to Europe and Latin America: Development of Strategies to Revitalize and Repatriate Technology and Know-how." and will unite researchers who are citizens of the EU Member States and Latin American countries in a multidisciplinary attempt to propose laws, technologies and economic policies designed to encourage locally produced technologies, enforcement of national data residency and creation of legislation which curbs the ability of foreign states to draw advantage from mass storage of data retrieved from EU and Latin American countries. "It's about finding ways to regain control over our own resources in the wake of unregulated cloud data storage and the mass surveillance and data collecting which big tech based in foreign countries has made possible. It is also about actually doing something about the lack of locally-produced cryptography, operating systems, applications and data storage facilities which is causing one of the most significant security crisis in decades in the EU and Latin America. This is something we need to be talking about together and actually doing something about," Njalsson stresses. The research project call will first unite a group of multidisciplinary researchers and efforts will be made to alert the European Commission and related security agencies as to the need to prioritize this issue in research, multidisciplinary framework programmes and in policy-making. More info about the general nature of the planned project can be found at: http://spacepol.aero/consultants/proy/default.asp The project aims to have a core group of researchers gathered by September of 2020 and Njalsson considers the nature of the project to warrant exceptional attention and priority on the part of EU members and the Commission