Daily Brief: 15 December 2025
European health systems embed US intelligence-linked analytics while citizens use VPNs that aren't where they claim to be—sovereignty is theater when infrastructure tells the real story.
Europe | Data | Health systems embed intelligence-linked analytics despite sovereignty laws
Situation
European health ministries have systematically contracted with US intelligence-linked firms like Palantir for healthcare data analytics, creating permanent infrastructure dependencies initially justified as temporary pandemic measures. Ireland’s Health Service Executive maintains Palantir systems managing 5.1 million citizen records four years after COVID emergency contracts.
These arrangements persist despite robust European data protection laws including GDPR and the 2024 European Health Data Space regulation. The legal framework assumes discrete data controllers and bounded transfers, but modern cloud infrastructure operates through nested global subcontracting that makes sovereignty enforcement practically impossible.
Context
European health systems face chronic underfunding with technical debt consuming 40% of IT budgets, making below-market US vendor offers irresistible despite sovereignty concerns. The regulatory response—creating Health Data Access Bodies and diplomatic frameworks like the EU-US Data Privacy Framework—adds bureaucratic layers without addressing underlying infrastructure dependencies.
US laws including the CLOUD Act and FISA Section 702 grant American authorities extraterritorial data access regardless of physical storage location. The Schrems II court recognized this threat but proposed technical remedies that cannot defeat legal compulsion when US companies control access keys.
Enforcement concentrates on visible violations like cookie compliance while intelligence access operates beyond regulatory visibility, creating systematic blind spots in sovereignty protection.
Trajectory
Data sovereignty requires continuous maintenance against entropy, but European institutions mandate governance without funding operational capacity. Technology evolution outpaces regulatory response—anonymisation techniques valid in 2018 are now trivially defeated.
The mathematical reality is stark: replacement costs exceed maintenance budgets, yet maintenance costs exceed operational capacity. This creates structural dependence on foreign infrastructure that legal frameworks cannot resolve.
European health data sovereignty is becoming a diplomatic fiction maintained through bureaucratic complexity rather than technical reality, with enforcement clustering where visibility exists rather than where threats operate.
Global | Technology | VPN providers route majority of traffic through virtual servers despite location marketing claims
Situation
Analysis of 8,000 VPN endpoints reveals systematic divergence between advertised and actual server locations. Virtual servers—software instances that simulate presence in one country while running on hardware in another—now constitute the majority of many providers’ global networks.
A user connecting to a “Swiss” VPN server may have traffic routed through German data centers, subject to German rather than Swiss legal frameworks. Providers use Border Gateway Protocol manipulation to assign foreign IP addresses to servers in cheaper jurisdictions.
The $77.8 billion VPN industry has built its business model on selling jurisdictional arbitrage—the promise that connecting through specific countries provides those nations’ legal protections.
Context
Digital sovereignty frameworks assume data has knowable geographic locations. GDPR transfer restrictions, China’s data localization requirements, and similar regulations depend on identifying when data crosses borders—a determination VPN routing makes impossible.
The Schrems II decision invalidated EU-US data transfers based on concerns about US intelligence access, but this reasoning assumes transfer is a discrete event rather than a probability distribution across multiple jurisdictions.
Enterprise compliance becomes legally fictional when Transfer Impact Assessments must evaluate protections in destination countries that cannot be reliably identified. Companies face asymmetric liability—regulators can reconstruct actual routing paths post-facto while enterprises cannot verify provider claims in real-time.
Trajectory
The infrastructure reality undermines the legal architecture of internet governance. Regulations written for a world where data geography was knowable are being applied to infrastructure where location is increasingly arbitrary.
China’s approach of regulating access patterns rather than storage locations represents more honest adaptation to routing realities. European frameworks maintaining geographic fiction will face increasing enforcement difficulties.
Mid-sized enterprises lack resources for private infrastructure verification, creating a compliance gap that benefits only the largest multinationals and privacy-haven VPN providers.
Until tomorrow.
