Digital Sovereignty

Much has been made of the United States' capture of Venezuela's president Nicholas Maduro. The thought that one nation can go into another country, capture the head of state and prosecute them is fundamentally abhorrent, regardless of the nature of Maduro's rule. Imagine members of Joint Task Force 2, the Canadian military's special operations unit going into, say, just for example, the United States and hauling their president back to Ottawa to be extradited to Brussels to face charges brought by the International Criminal Court. It's almost unimaginable.

Mr. Trump's sabre-rattling about making Canada a 51st state is not to be ignored. There are too many instances of Trump saying what he's going to do, then doing it.

Speaking of the International Criminal Court, Trump doesn't much like what they're doing. There are war crime and crimes against humanity charges against Benjamin Netanyahu. Vladimir Putin is subject to an arrest warrant for war crimes against the people of Ukraine. For these reasons, among others, the United States doesn't adhere to the statutes of the ICC. Trump gets along very well with Netanyahu and Putin and would hate to see them behind bars; he came very close to it himself.

In fact, the U.S. has sanctioned a number of judges sitting on the Court, including a Canadian judge. Which got me thinking about the cautionary tale for Canada.

The U.S. won't start with a troop invasion. They'll do what they've done to the ICC members. The sanctions mean they can't use their credit cards. Visa and Mastercard are processed in the United States and these companies can't provide their services as it would violate the sanctions imposed by Trump. They can't subscribe to Netflix, go on Facebook, X or Instagram. They can't use Apple digital services, and are no longer able to use their iPhones or Google Pixel phones where the software and connected services pass through the U.S. Cloud storage: poof. Photos: gone. It's 1995 all over again for the judges. No more Apple ID, no G-Mail, Google Docs or any other services that these companies provide. Yahoo mail simply disappears. OneDrive no longer works, along with the Microsoft Office suite of applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc.).

They can't use U.S. banking services. The Swift processing system, in which the U.S. financial system participates, prevents banks and financial institutions based in the U.S. from clearing cheques, drafts or providing bank accounts and debit cards. ICC members can't pay their bills on-line. They can't purchase U.S. currency as that would involve Swift.

Imagine if you will, The Donald decides one day to pull the plug on Canada. Your credit card doesn't work. Canadian banks issue Visa and Mastercard, but the data is cleared through the U.S. They'd have no choice but to shut down your card. You'd have to go back to cash and cheques for everything. Amazon purchasing would go away. Streaming services would disappear. 

Any internet connected vehicle is at risk. Teslas could be pulled over to the side of the road, inoperable after a strategic order. Virtually every vehicle produced in the last 10 years that has a cellular SIM card could be disabled. Don't think your expensive European car is exempt. Most manufacturers base their Canadian operations and data services in the United States, and they would be subject to the same sanctions.

Sure, this is the doomsday scenario. But Starlink turned off access to their internet service in Ukraine's occupied territories when it looked like they were making advances on Russian forces. There's nothing to stop the existing cabal of U.S. oligarchs from making similar decisions at the behest of Trump.

And yes, I know this makes me sound like some kind of conspiracy nut/grumpy old man ranting at the moon and yelling, "get off my lawn". But the ICC judges are living this. As a nation, we have to get ahead of this. Digital sovereignty isn't easy. Personally, we were looking for a web site creation company that provides easy-to-use building blocks to create the site. Almost all of them, include European ones, use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support their services. Shopify uses Google Cloud Platform and AWS and their own data centres. If you're running an on-line Shopify store, your income is at risk. There are no Canadian-based credit cards that rely on Canada only clearing. 

We've started weaning ourselves off U.S. services. We don't use Yahoo mail anymore (ok, I'm gradually changing all the passwords linked to my Yahoo mail to another service, but this takes time), and we're using a Canadian provider for cloud storage services called Sync.com. It's a paid service, but as they say, if it's free, then you're the product. I'm still looking into mobile phones and their associated services and I'm the first to admit this is a really tough one. Plus there are no Canadian made computers. Theoretically, Apple and Microsoft could push an update to every computer in use in Canada and disable it.

I used to blog using Substack. This blog is written using open source software called Publii, based in Europe. It runs locally on my computer and I upload the files to a Canadian-based web hosting company that has servers located in Canada. This is my first post, so patience please while I get this stuff figured out. But I can bay at the moon all I want and Trump can't shut it down.

Until, at least, the Americans show up at my door and tell me to turn off my computer.

In the meantime, here's a photo of the world's most beautiful Calico cat, Ruby.