Digital Sovereignty and the Nation-State

I run a Canadian cloud company, and I spend most of my working weeks arguing that Canadians should keep their data out of reach of American law. An American company can be compelled to hand over data it controls wherever that data is stored, which is why a Canadian data centre run by a US provider doesn't settle anything, and why a Microsoft executive said as much under oath. So I host in Canada, on servers I operate myself, and I tell anyone who'll listen to do the same.

As important as I believe digital sovereignty is, we have to understand how dangerous it is to tie that solely to the nation-state. I posted that on Mastodon this week, and this is the longer version.

What gets sold as Buy Canadian

A lot of what gets built under the Buy Canadian banner takes an existing product, puts "Can" or "North" in front of the name, and ships it with a maple leaf. Personally, I believe it to be poor taste. It also insults the people it's sold to, because it assumes a Canadian will put up with a worse tool as long as it's wearing the right colours. More Canadians building is a good thing, and I'd rather see a good product that happens to be sovereign than a sovereign product that happens to be bad, because a tool whose only argument is the flag gets dropped the day a better one shows up, and the people dropping it would be right.

Taste is the smaller problem, though. What bothers me more is what that pitch teaches people sovereignty means. If the product is closed, the data only comes out the way the vendor allows, and the company can change its terms whenever it likes, then moving it to a Canadian address gives you the same arrangement under a different landlord.

Sovereignty belongs to more than a country

Most of the conversation stops at the border, at whose jurisdiction the servers sit in and whose courts can reach them. I think those questions matter, and they're the reason Storm Buckets is hosted and operated entirely in Canada. But a country is only one of the things that can be sovereign. Recognize the Sovereignty of the individual, their communities, their culture. A person deciding who reads their files is exercising it, and so is a community running its own server, and so is a culture keeping its own archive. I run one of those myself, a Mastodon instance called Social Ontario. These are the things that nation-states often trample over when they become too powerful.

A country can change

The nation-state can change at any moment. That flag you love today can represent something different in a few decades. The last decade in the United States showed how quickly a country's institutions can bend, and Germany went from a democracy to a dictatorship in a matter of months.

I don't think Canada is immune, and I don't have to imagine very hard. Our own Department of National Defence has had Palantir's Gotham inside our special forces since 2020, on a contract it flagged "not for public disclosure," and it still won't say what the software does. A Canadian institution, on Canadian soil, decided Canadians don't get to know, and I find that extremely concerning.

Why blind nationalism scares me

Blind nationalism is a leap of faith that has been known to lead down dark and dangerous paths. It takes a question nobody can answer, whether my country will still deserve my trust in thirty years, and answers it with a feeling. I overthink ethics like no tomorrow, and I still can't make that feeling carry the weight of somebody else's data.

I can love Canada and still refuse the leap. Loving a country, the way I understand it, includes staying honest about what it could turn into and building as though that might happen. Refusing to pretend is the first half, and the second half is doing something about it, because one person declining to believe doesn't protect anybody. The moral revolt is the ethical responsibility. I got stuck on the same problem when I wrote about Levinas, where I ended up saying I can't trust the institution and can't do without it. For someone who runs infrastructure, the responsibility has a concrete shape, which is making sure a person can leave.

What a person can do when it changes

So the engineering question I keep coming back to is what a person can still do if the company or the country turns on them, and the only answer I trust is that they can leave with everything. Storm Buckets runs on Garage, which is open source, so anyone can run the same engine on their own machines without us. It speaks S3, so any standard tool can copy every object out, and we document what it supports so nobody finds out the hard way.

aws --profile storm s3 sync s3://my-bucket ./my-bucket

Garage is built by Deuxfleurs, a French non-profit, and people ask me how French software makes anything Canadian-sovereign. Open source belongs to whoever runs it, and I run it in Canada. I made the same argument from the other side when a backup client hardcoded us-east-1, and I said then that I'd object to a mandatory Canadian label too.

Being hosted in Canada is a good reason to choose us, and being able to leave is what keeps it a choice after the country or the company changes.

What I'm asking of anyone building Canadian

This is why it matters so much for those building "Buy Canadian" services and products. Sovereignty isn't just a flag to the country your users pay fealty to, it's respect for the users themselves. The best way to give that respect is rejecting lock-in schemes, radical transparency, and building on open source anyone can run without you.

I love this country, which is the reason I don't want it to be the only thing standing between a person and whoever wants their data. None of it is ever finished, because whoever governs next gets a say over the servers on their soil, mine included, and I'd rather keep the exit open for the rest of my life than ask anyone to take my country on faith.