When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in early 2025, the consequences were far-reaching yet quickly enforced.
The restrictions cut off the ICC chief prosecutor’s access to Microsoft services, including email, followed by a freezing of his personal and institutional bank accounts in affected jurisdictions.
While this was happening, the Dutch government was watching, coming to the bitter realization that access to essential services depended on decisions made in the U.S.
Hence, their response to this is DAWO, short for Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid, or Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English.
It is a framework that looks to tackle the government’s digital stack, covering the OS, an office suite, collaboration apps, cloud services, IT management tools, and AI, with all of it being built around a NixOS foundation.
Unless they’re using Chinese microprocessors like LoongArm, their CPUs were partly designed in Israel, and may well have backdoors for Mossad to use in the direst emergencies. Running a sovereign Linux (or OpenBSD or 9front or TempleOS for that matter) doesn’t mitigate these.
If they are running Chinese CPUs, replace “Mossad” with “PLA”.
You argument is exactly what someone would say, if they want to prevent the other side from blunting that sanctioning tool by taking counter measures.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
And all those CPUs are built in the first place using licensed Dutch photolithography tech. Funny how it all comes full circle, and also, I think the Dutch government already knows about this stuff.
Good point. Better keep using Windows until we can build 100% of the components in our own living rooms.
Honestly, there’s no reason not to use 15 year old CPUs, if not for better efficiency. But the difference will not be as big with current-gen ones.
Ah yes, only perfection counts.
If you’re not doing 101% of what you could and then some, why even bother in the first place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML
If poked they’re probably the best company on earth to go their own way with hardware.
Hardware sovereignty is another whole chapter that takes a lot more time and preparation to tackle. Modern semiconductor production capabilities cannot be created by a bunch of coders like adapting NixOS - you need to plan and construct high-tech facilities, and those are dependent on an actual nightmare of logistic problems that have only been solved a number of times all over the world - for the latest silicon using EUV that number is one.
There is a push to create the capability for Europe to be sovereign in this space too, but this will probably take decades to finish regardless of how many ressources you throw at it.
But making sure that the US cannot turn off your administration by remote switch is a lot easier to accomplish, and very much needed.
“I want to improve society somewhat”
Other realities also exist.
Just geoblock outbound network traffic to locations you don’t want to reach.
This will also protect you from US tech being taken over by other malware and calling C2C in “bad places”*
*good people also live in those locations