Arjen Kamphuis - The IT of another Europe

12 year before Snowden the EU already knew they should not trust US tech but chose to make itself more dependent on it anyway. We need a radical change in the way we select the tech that runs our society. The Stuxnet case and the revelations by Edward Snowden have shown how fundamental the problems (and challenges to fix them) are. Most systems and platforms in common use are, by design untrustworthy in ways that cannot be fixed barring regime change in the US. While a lot more work needs to be done on detecting breaches of security sooner this does not really solve any problems, just cleans up the mess afterwards. In order to re-gain trust in systems because we can *trust* them we need to be willing to move away from proprietary systems and ’cloud’ computers under the control of foreign powers. Even the most common used hardware platforms and CPU-architectures need to be up for discussion and replacement by more trustworthy alternatives. Nothing is irreplaceable and by replacing what we know we cannot trust by things we can a future of computing under control of citizens is possible.