PassW0rd’s data sovereignty programme Borders in Cyberspace

The US president Donald Trump’s erratic behaviour on the world stage has provoked a massive European data sovereignty backlash as France becomes the latest nation to reject US Big Tech.

The announcement that the French Government will switch from the Microsoft operating system to the Linux open source platform is part of an ongoing attempt to reduce European reliance on US technology.

The trend has already seen announcements from the Dutch, and Danish governments and some German states announcing they were adopting Linux due to concerns over what is being called US ‘data imperialism.’ The US president has publicly stated that it is America’s intention to have 100% of the world’s data running over US computer infrastructure.

Regaining control of its digital destiny

In announcing the French plans, the Civil Service Minister David Amiel, couched the decision as a revolt stating the move was an attempt to “regain control of our digital destiny,” adding France; “can no longer accept that it doesn’t have control over its data and digital infrastructure.

The growing and angry European rebellion against US ‘Big Tech’ is underpinned by an intensifying sense that the US is imposing its digital will on the Continent and ignoring national laws and concerns about online safety.

A day before the announcement. Future Intelligence’s PassWord radio programme, broadcast ‘Borders in Cyberspace‘ on ResonanceFM, the first of a two-part series on data sovereignty exploring the backlash and how independence from the US can be accomplished.

Speaking in the PassW0rd programme, the firebrand Finnish MEP Aura Sulla said that it was essential for European security for Europe to have technology it controlled. Sulla pointed to Microsoft’s decision to cut off the email account of Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, as a pivotal moment.

Khan’s email was cut off by Microsoft, one of the group of companies along with Meta, Apple, Google and Amazon that are known as hyperscalers, after Khan was sanctioned by the US Government for issuing an arrest warrant for the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes in Gaza.

The kill switch that kicked off the row

An action that many European politicians are describing as the Microsoft ‘kill switch’. Pointing out that the company could just as easily cut off a government as an individual.

Sulla also stressed the fact that US companies are all subject to the US Cloud Act. This means they are obliged to share any data on demand with the US Government irrespective of whose data it is and where it is held.

“So, now it’s a momentum for European defence, for the comprehensive security approach, and for our technology to finally stand on our own.

“There are a couple of things that happened that made a huge push. It’s of course, Microsoft using the kill switch last year, and showing us that they can do that if they want, because all these hyperscalers from the US, are under the US law.

“No matter how they are trying to do their PR case, that they have a company also here in Europe.
“So they are under a US law, meaning that they are under a Trump administration and whatever Trump thinks next.”

A flexing of power in the cloud

And it is the latter power, conferred on the US Government by the US Cloud Act, that has infuriated the Europeans. Cutting off Khan’s email account was proof that the US would act extra-territorially, the US Cloud Act shows how far the US could reach.

Quite literally, according to Sulla, a former head of EU Affairs for Meta, being able to go to the heart of countries and having the ability to turn off government systems and seize the most personal of data.

“So, they showed us in France, with an international court prosecutor, that they can use the kill switch and cut our access to their services whenever they want. And I think that really made a change in Brussels, because many of us, we have been advocating also, like, you know, sovereignty for a long time.

“However, now it’s a new time, a new phase. And we need to rapidly now build our own technology sector.”

Sulla’s outrage is shared by other politicians in Europe and the UK and Microsoft’s actions over Khan’s email account were also highlighted in PassW0rd’s ‘Borders in Cyberspace’ programme by Lord Clement Jones, the House of Lords Liberal Democrat spokesman for Science, Innovation and Technology.

UK data sovereignty complacency

Lord Clement Jones expressed shock at the complacency of the UK Government.

“It isn’t just on the continent that there’s an issue with Microsoft. The Scottish police found Microsoft couldn’t guarantee to them that data about criminals and crime prevention couldn’t be exported to the States or retained in the States and be subject to the Cloud Act.

“So, this idea that, your data can be kept in the States and transmitted across borders, is a direct violation of your personal privacy. It can be worked on, even if it’s not as sensitive as criminal information, but it’s still your personal data. What you’re doing is giving an advantage to those who hold that data, and if that data is held abroad, you have no sovereign data advantage.

“I’ve been interrogating the UK Government on this, but it seems oblivious to the desirability of having sovereign cloud capability. The UK seems to think it’s a great idea to have the civil service use US cloud services,” said Lord Clement-Jones.

Four days after the French announcement a report by the UK Open Rights Group (ORG) warned that the UK is over-reliant on a small number of big US tech companies. The ORG Report said that US big tech services used by the UK Government to provide critical datacentres, software and digital infrastructure, was placing UK national security at risk. The ORG report was backed by a number of UK MPs.

In the event of Europe winning the War of digital Independence from the US, quite who will send Europe a Statue of Liberty to commemorate the event is unclear.

TechTV’s data sovereignty debate, the British perspective

Future Intelligence and our sister organisation TechTV have been following data sovereignty since its beginnings in 1996. For our latest discussion in the TechTV Studio on the topic in August 2025 click on the link below.

The post Europe’s digital War of Independence appeared first on Future Intelligence.

Experts monitoring satellites in space warn of potential war as global tensions spin into orbit.

Western space experts are accusing Russia and China of ratcheting up global fears of a space war. And cite cyber and satellite provocation in the fast growing area

According to leading researchers, military tensions have led to a significant increase in ‘satellite intimidation.’

A practice that so far has involved moving satellites dangerously close to other satellites. A tactic compounded by demonstrating the ability to physically grab space craft with mechanical arms.

Those monitoring satellites have also seen worrying patterns demonstrating aggressive capability, such as eavesdropping, and intimidation. Activity they say is augmenting cyber attacks on satellites, space communications systems, and the jamming of base stations.

It’s a detailed confirmation of a conflict first revealed by Future Intelligence nearly ten years ago in an exclusive interview with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, then head of research, Dr Patricia Lewis, that laid out the methods now being seen.

The activity has increased in line with tension caused by the Ukrainian War, the threat to Taiwan, and super-power competition between the US and China.

The intimidation activities mirror similar patterns of disruption on Earth say researchers. The attacks in space mimic those on the undersea cables feeding data into the global internet.

The conflict has also intensified in line with a recognition space is increasingly valuable place.

According to a recent UK House of Lords report published in November 2025, ‘The Space Economy: Act Now Or Lose Out‘ the global space sector is currently valued at over £342 billion.

“Many expect it to grow significantly—while estimates vary and are contested, several witnesses cited a recent report that predicted that the global space economy will be worth £1.8 trillion by 2035. Over £34.34 billion of private capital has been invested in the global space sector since 2015, growing on average by 21% annually,” stated the report.

Creating a strategic imbalance

“China is very much talking about space strategically, and they use their space assets and the things that they’re practicing are designed for that. It is true demonstration of power. It’s not just for exploration,” said Clinton Clark, the Vice President of First Impressions, for ExoAnalytic Solutions, the Houston-based operator of the world’s largest commercial space telescope network.

“It is about the execution and use of power, full stop, to create strategic imbalance.

“And then I think when I look at the way the Russians operate their spacecraft, they’re thriving on disruption. And it maps to how they talk about it. 

“It maps to what’s going on terrestrially. And they are testing the boundaries of behaviour in space and being very unpredictable,” said Clark, a former USAF spacecraft systems analyst. Clark was speaking at an event organised by the internationally respected UK defence think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, earlier this week.

According to Ralph Dinsley, the founder of 3S Northumbria, the activities of the Chinese and Russian spacecraft were a combination of confrontation, surveillance and potential data interception.

Surveillance satellites targeting other satellites

Dinsley, a former RAF aerospace battle manager, says on several occasions satellites had been detected deliberately changing position. The intention is of either moving behind, or in front of satellites, to gather information on their construction, or to crack transmission security patterns.

A satellite simply moving out of its normal orbit, was enough to set off a warning, said Dinsley, who also spoke at the RUSI event.

“There are so many implications about transiting in and around Geo-stationary Earth Orbit. If you move away from the GEO belt, you’re obviously no longer stationary, and broadcasting back to the Earth, but instead moving one way or another around that belt. 

Eavesdropping in space

“If you’re transiting above geo, you’re obviously looking at the back of those satellites that you’re going past. So you can pick out certain characteristics of those satellites, work out what their capabilities may, or may not be, and vice versa.  If you’re below GEO, then you can look at the front. Obviously, it’ll depend on where the sun is at the time when you’re transiting, if you have sun advantage or not. Ideally, you can utilize above or below the GEO belt to actually take observations of any target satellites that you might be interested in to see what they’re doing.  

“You can also listen to those satellites you transit past as well. If you’re below GEO, you can fly through the cone of communications of both ways from the ground to the satellite and back down again. So it gives you a lot of optical and audible advantages over those satellites on orbit,” said Dinsley, adding that they had often detected satellites carrying out those manoeuvres

Recently, according to both men, a Russian intelligence gathering satellite called Luch-Olymp, suddenly broke with a pattern of behaviour it had been demonstrating for a number of years. Typically, it would stay around 45 km away from Intelsat 37E, a US intelligence satellite. Then suddenly it changed position and moved to less than two kilometres away from 37E.

Aggressive space manoeuvres

“Well, I mean, the expectation for what we expect of Luch-Olymp is the fact that it’s a listening signals intelligence gatherer. And therefore, is there any real need for it to get particularly close to any satellite?  Unless, of course, it has a different capability on board than we weren’t expecting. 

“If you think about a ground station broadcasting to a satellite or vice versa, particularly a ground station broadcasting up, the actual intelligence gatherer doesn’t have to get particularly close to the satellite to pick up on the uplift because it’s quite a wide beam. For some reason, Luch-Olymp decided that it wanted to get a lot, lot closer. 

“The big question is, what was it doing? Was it leaving something behind? Was it inspecting the satellite? Or was it actually trying to get more defined signals to be able to get inside the cryptographic system to be able to try and break codes?

A possibility the Russian satellite’s proximity to the US spacecraft makes more likely. Picking up signals destined for the US satellite can be done from huge distances, according to Clark.

Increase in hostility

“The communications dish that pushes information up to 37 E is typically 1 degree wide and so that’s 700 kilometres wide by the time you get to geo. So, if you’re within 350 kilometres, you can listen to that signal. So, when you get to within two kilometres, the implication is you’re likely doing something else,” said Clark.

The news of the increase in hostilities in space set out by RUSI, in a presentation to its members was confirmed last October, at the Software Defined Space Conference in Tallinn, in Estonia on the Russian border, attended by Future Intelligence.

“There is an increase in hostile manoeuvres, unwelcomed manoeuvres, unannounced manoeuvres, but there is not fully yet a war in orbit, said Clemence Poirier, a senior researcher at Switzerland’s ETH Zurich University’s Center for Security Studies, and a leading researchers on the issue. Poirier added that even commercial systems like Elon Musk’s StarLink had now become targets.

“Now it’s also including a lot of commercial space services used by belligerents as well. So, we distinguish that from the weaponization of outer space. That is the use and placement of weapons in space. And this is slowly emerging. It’s not fully there yet.

Missile threats, satellite attacks, and cyber warfare

“They are like things that states have been observing, such as development of counter-space capabilities, anti-satellite tests,” said Poirier.

“Some states are also projecting hardly identifiable sub-satellites. So that means that one of their satellite is ejecting a sub-satellite. Some states like the US and China are developing space planes that are highly manoeuvrable. There are also dual-use systems that can be repurposed to be used as weapons to attack adversary satellites.

“There’s also a development of civilian technologies that can be turned into weapons. Like robotic arms that can grab a satellite to remove debris. So, it’s a civilian mission, but if you can grab the debris, you can also grab an adversary satellite.”

Hybrid warfare

An ability recently demonstrated by the Chinese according to Clark.

Aggressive satellite activity, that according to those monitoring the developments, intensified during the Ukrainian War. These attacks are being used to apply geo-political pressure as part of co-ordinated attempts to demonstrate an ability to threaten vital global communications systems.

As a result, we are now seeing attempts to jam ground stations, the hacking of satellites unprotected against cyber-attack, and physical attacks on the vital space craft orbiting our planet. The cyber attack on satellites is particularly worrying as it could render them useless without generating physical debris. A hacking vulnerability many satellites have little or no defence against as they were considered beyond hacker’s reach.

A cyber attack that like the aggressive moves by satellites has started to dramatically intensify according to Poirier, whose recent report on the issue ‘Breaking the Final Frontier: Cyber operations against the space sector’ followed 237 mostly Palestinian hacktivist attacks on satellites during the Gaza War.

Poirier noted that attacks on satellites from hackers now closely follow events on Earth. At the start of the Ukrainian War for instance, attacks from Russia involved satellite hacking, intimidation and jamming.

Virtual European Space Command

In a recognition of the threat to satellites from hacking, the EU has announced its plans for an encrypted space network. A nod to the increasing geo-political tensions caused by the US. A tension resulting in both Sweden and France announcing plans to stop using US technology systems like Zoom and Microsoft.

On January 27, 2026, Andrius Kubilius, the European Union’s Commissioner for Defence and Space revealed that eight satellites from five different member states are currently being pooled as part of GOVSATCOM. The Commission sees this as a first step towards less dependence on the US .

“If you protect only your own country, your own army, we shall not learn to fight as Europe. We will not deter Putin. We will not succeed in our defence,” Kubilius said in a speech at the European Space Conference, in which he pitched the idea of a “virtual European Space Command”.

European Union member states now have access to European-made “secure and encrypted” satellite communication, Kubilius also announced in the speech.

“Last week we started GOVSATCOM operations. That means all member states can now have access to sovereign satellite communication. Military and government. Secure and encrypted. Built in Europe, operated in Europe, under European control,” said Kubilius, describing it as the “first step in satellite connectivity”.

The announcement has expanded coverage and bandwidth targets that were set for 2027. A development that lays the groundwork ahead of the rollout of the Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²), a multi-orbital constellation of 290 satellites, is now expected in 2029 instead of 2030.

These efforts are all part of plans to reduce the EU’s dependence on foreign space services, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink. They are also part of the EU’s efforts to bolster the bloc’s defence capabilities and readiness before the end of the decade. A point some intelligence agencies have highlighted as the potential moment Russia could attack another European country.

The post Space cold war warms up appeared first on Future Intelligence.

Future Intelligence’s sister organisation, TechTV’s programme on ID cards

The Government’s confused announcement of a Digital ID card scheme faces disaster, unless the Government sets out clear plans, according to experts contacted by Future Intelligence.

In what many observers have interpreted as a knee jerk reaction to head off opinion poll advances by the Reform Party, UK Premier Sir Kier Starmer, announced the introduction of a digital ID card scheme. The key benefit of which would be that without it you could not work. Though Sir Kier neglected to provide any further details.

A confusion that has provoked David Birch, one of the world’s leading experts on digital identity, to urgently call on the Government  for clarity.

“I mean, I’m reluctant to call it a scheme. Let’s call it the government digital identity notion. So far, when journalists ask me: ‘what do you think about the government ID scheme?

“I reply; ‘well, I don’t think anything about it, because I don’t know what it is’.

“You’d have to tell me what it is before I can form any opinion about it, and I have no clue what it is. I don’t think the government do either at the moment, so it’s all a bit up in the air,” said Birch, a former Professor at Surrey University, and now a Senior Research Fellow at King’s College Business School in London and a Digital Fellow at the University of Exeter Business School’s DIGIT Lab.

Massive protest across political divide

A confusion threatening to drown the scheme before it’s even launched. So far 2,984,192 people have signed a petition calling for the abandonment of the initiative. The opposition has come from across the political spectrum, and for a huge number of different reasons. Reasons that range from surveillance fears to cyber security concerns.

In an extraordinary twist, the muddle over the initiative from the Government’s proposal even extends to the Government.

According to the UK Premier, the scheme is intended to prevent illegal migrants from working, but that power already exists, said Sacha Wooldridge, the Head of Immigration at the law firm Birketts.

“Arguably, we already have a scheme whereby you can prove your right to work. As a British national, you can turn up with your passport, or birth certificate to prove your right to work.

“So, when the government says having digital IDs will stop illegal working in the UK, we already have a system that does that. Any further development of that, and rollout to British nationals isn’t going to make a huge amount of difference. As the government have already identified, things like illegal working will take place, just more underground.

“Reputable companies already want to do the right thing. Those that are intending to subvert the rules are going to do so anyway. A digital ID, I don’t think, would make a huge amount of difference in that respect…I think the key thing is trust.”

Public trust essential for ID card success

As several experts interviewed for Future Intelligence’s PassW0rd radio show – ‘Your country wants to know you’ – broadcast on Resonance FM, have pointed out, trust is essential.

Something stressed by Ott Velsberg, the chief data architect of the Estonian Government. So far Estonia’s extremely successful national ID card scheme has signed up 1m of the country’s population of 1.5m people.

“That data can only be collected and used for the reasons stipulated in the law itself. So, a data minimization principle. Now when it comes to the ownership of data, the most important part is citizen centric data governance. This is not too much talked about in the UK for instance.
“So enabling citizens to actually decide who the third parties or stakeholders are, who can use the data,” said Velsberg.

It’s a trust that the anti-ID card petition has proved the Government has already lost, but according to Alesandro Hatami, founder of the consultancy company Pacemakers, and an expert on digital ID systems, the benefits of getting ID cards right in the UK could be huge.

“Well, the thing is, we live in a world of digital services. If we can’t identify ourselves for these digital services, we will be excluded. Then we will have to pay high prices, and we will get a low quality of service.

The promise of digital ID cards

“The NHS could be more efficient, our taxation systems could be more efficient, our financial services organisation would be more efficient,” said Hatami, adding, many protesting had already developed digital IDs with Big Tech, for uses they were unaware about. Digital ID he said, promised the opportunity to develop a usable ID they could control

“What digital ID helps most is not the affluent. It’s not the middle classes. It’s the less affluent that can really benefit from having a means of authenticating themselves that is not a bank account, or a utility bill.

“So, it is about equality, it is about transparency, it’s about opportunity. Politicians are unhelpfully damaging the UK public by creating noise about something that is an obvious benefit to all of us,” said Hatami, who dismissed the fears of surveillance as misinformed.

“State surveillance, what would that look like? The state would know where I bank, but the state knows where I bank. The state would know what my health situation is, but the state knows what my health situation is. So, the state would know where I’m trying to apply for a mortgage, or a loan, but the state already knows where I’m applying for a mortgage, or a loan.

“If the state wanted to control us, it doesn’t need the ID to do that. If you want to be a dictatorship you can control your people, you don’t need a digital ID to do so.

“So, digital ID just makes life easier, and we have to trust the government not to use it in a poor way. We trust the government not to do that in so many other fields. That is the fear, but the issue is not the digital ID, it’s how the government uses it.”

Government not a fit data guardian

A point that hits on the main problem. In survey after survey, the institution the British people trust least with their data is the Government.

A trust not helped by the UK Government’s susceptibility to cyber attacks, and data loss.

Since 2020 it has lost significant amounts of data.

During that time the Government has confirmed six cyber attacks. In one the entire Electoral Roll was stolen, in another the names and vetting details of 47,000 Metropolitan police officers, while the bank details and names of serving military personnel were lost following a hack on a Ministry of Defence payroll system, and a number of people claiming legal aid were also hacked amongst others.

The losses to cyber attacks were aggravated by the Government itself, which was responsible for seven other data losses including losing the details of 3,700 Afghans fleeing the Taliban accidentally leaked by UK Special Forces, while in another incident police in Norfolk and Suffolk accidentally published the personal details of 1,230 sexual abuse victims, witnesses and suspects on its website.

The woeful history of total UK Government data losses can be found here

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To listen to the PassW0rd radio programme on digital ID cards ‘Your country wants to know you’.

Click on the link below

To view the programme and additional material on TechTV please click on the link below.

The post Digital ID card row: to be, or not to be appeared first on Future Intelligence.

The M&S hack has battered not only the retailer’s computer systems and business it has also battered its brand.

The hack by a global hacking group rumoured to be called ‘Scattered Spider’ is costing the store group £43m a week estimates from the Bank of America claim and it has brought M&S’ computer operation to its knees, stripping its shelves of products, and visibly hit the group’s reputation.

According to a BBC report, damage from the hack, which surfaced exactly a month ago, and was exclusively revealed by Future Intelligence (Fi) on LinkedIn, will last until July and cost the company around £300m, but the damage is deeper because of M&S’ reputation.

The attacks on high-street household names have had a greater impact on the UK national psyche than similar hacks on British Airways and the British Library for the simple reason that people can see the results on the shelves of the retail chains.

Police promise manhunt for criminals

As a result, UK police have publicly committed to hunting down the criminals.

“We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we’ve got a range of different hypotheses, and we’ll follow the evidence to get to the offenders,” said Paul Foster, head of the NCA’s national cyber-crime unit.

“In light of all the damage that we’re seeing, catching whoever is behind these attacks is our top priority,” he added.

According to a top company insider M&S, had no continuity plan for an cyber-attack: “We didn’t have any business continuity plan [for this], we didn’t have a cyber-attack plan,” the source said in an off the record interview to Sky TV.

Is M&S hack a line in the sand?

Yet according to experts interviewed on Fi’s new television arm TechTV, all of these incidents are combining to mark a watershed in cyber-attacks and the public perception of them, because of a growing frustration that companies do not care about their customer’s most intimate asset, their data.

Speaking on the TechTV panel Salford University’s Professor of Marketing Vish Maheshwari, said: “I think this connects to a softer piece of consumer psychology, if you look at the way it effects in the trust built in the brand.

“If your consumers and customers are looking at the company, the organization, and even the people at the at the top and thinking they all are fully aware of scenarios whether it be technological development or issues like cyber-attacks.

“It certainly gives you satisfaction as a consumer, thinking I’m in the right hands if my data is in the right hands, I am dealing with the correct organization, where everybody’s fully aware.  

M&S had no cyber attack response plan

“In this case particularly in M&S, whether there was a backup plan, or not, I think the key point was that employees were not ready for this. They were not trained to deal with this, whether it the top board or whether the middle level managers or the shop floor managers, they were just not prepared.

“The biggest lesson they could learn from this is to ensure full awareness of the impact it could have on their brand. To come out of this well I think how that plays into the consumer psychology will play a part in its rebuilding.

“At the moment the data says only 7 to 9% brand trust has been lost for M&S and that’s not massive.”

But as Ross Brewer, vice-President of the cyber security company Graylog, pointed out on the TechTV panel, cyber security incidents take a while to unravel.

“With cyber incidents with big retailers in the US what happened was the cyber security incident started to get shareholders questioning the executive’s decision-making processes and their professionalism. Then you go back six months later, and the chief executive officer’s gone, the chief information office is gone, and the chief information security officer is gone.

The sting in the tail

“So, all these executives on tens of millions of dollars lost their roles because of a cyber incident and that was the start of it because it started to call into question other things about the management team. So, I think executives must be really careful about this because it does have a long tail and it’s got a sting in it.”

A shareholder response that is increasingly being shared by customers weary of repetitive cyber-attacks.

A straw poll by Fi across the country found that customers saw the attack on M&S and the store groups collapse as one step too far on the high street.

A hack on a High St sycamore tree?

“It really has been an epic fail,” said a woman shopper passing the Loughborough M&S. “It’s unbelievable that they had no plan. They are having a mare.”

Another M&S shopper in Manchester confided that she and her daughter were going into the shop for a bra fitting.

“I know it might sound silly, but that’s intimate, personal, information and they store that online and I would not be comfortable with that being in the hands of a stranger.

While another woman in Ipswich said that the attack had hit at M&S’ reputation.

“I go in there for school blouses and bras for my daughter. The last time I went in they offered me a loyalty card, after this I am glad, I declined. I always went there for undies because you can rely on them being in stock and having something you will want.

“It’s dependable, they had a currency exchange and a food hall and most importantly they had a toilet. I went in there because it’s a dependable, reliable place. Having a cyber-attack makes them just like anyone else.”

A direct attack on M&S’ advertising branding slogan of: “It’s not any food, it’s M&S food,” according to one male shopper, who quipped; “It’s not any old cyber-attack, it’s an M&S’ cyber-attack.”

Fi did contact M&S to ask for a spokesperson for a comment, but neither at the time of broadcasting, or of printing had received a response.

To watch the TechTV discussion of the damage the hack has done to M&S’ reputation click on the image below

(The names of the M&S customers are known to us but for privacy reasons we are keeping them confidential)

The post The M&S hack is a brand attack appeared first on Future Intelligence.

Experts interviewed by Future Intelligence during the making of the PassW0rd radio programme into data centres, ‘Planning data motorways of the AI age,’ have warned that data centres are already creating water stress and energy issues that long-term will have implications for people and wildlife.

According to Professor Andrew Chien, of the University of Chicago, and one of the world’s foremost researchers on data centres, to avoid the systems now using AI competing with people for energy and power their siting and use must be carefully planned.

Within the next six years due to AI, Professor Chien said data centre energy use will grow sixfold in the US and at a similar rate in Europe.

Huge AI power demand predicted

“There’s no question AI has put this growth on steroids. And that’s because it’s a fundamentally different way of delivering services,” said Professor Chien. A difference, he says, that has happened because AI has turned web searches into computations that arrive at an answer for us instead of forcing us to do the searches ourselves.

“It’s made web search or queries like that into a compute intensive service, which is what this large language model is. It’s like a giant sparse matrix computation. It’s what you do every time you put 3 words into Chat GPT.”

It’s a development that means that the energy required is not only increasing, but so is the demand for clean water to cool the servers which now provide the backbone of our high-tech world.

“In the Western United States and in the South West US any industrial use that consumes water is in competition with wildlife and people. There are whole nations like India, where much of the country is in water stress all the time. So, they’re looking at it with the view of how do we develop this information economy we have to have and deal with those challenges?”
“China is often talked about as an AI competitor but China has huge water stress in many parts of its geographic area. The water is not well distributed. It’s a common problem and there’s parts of Europe that have the same issues,” said Professor Chien, a former Vice President in charge of research for the computer chip giant Intel, and an expert on the siting of data centres in areas of low water demand and renewable energy.

Data centres compete with people for energy and water

The issue of competition for water and power is so critical that the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, in a conference last November, drew attention to the fact that in Northern Virginia, data centres were now in direct competition with the local population for energy and water.

A situation recognised on the website of the North Virginia Regional Commission, a grouping of 13 local councils.

“Sustaining reductions of greenhouse gases and supplying efficient and reliable energy to Northern Virginia’s data centres is a complex economic and environmental process.  

“Northern Virginia’s 250+ data centres handle roughly 70% of global internet traffic. – the highest concentration of data centres in the world.  

“Collectively, data centres contribute over a billion dollars of tax revenue to the budgets of Northern Virginia’s local governments. Power demand in Virginia is expected to grow by about 85% over the next 15 years.  

“By 2035 the industry in Virginia will require 11,000 megawatts – or nearly quadruple what it needed in 2022. The accelerated applications of artificial intelligence are projected to further multiply power demands over the next decade.”

A reality that will soon confront the UK due to the accelerated demand for data centres that the Government has stated that the UK must meet and one that is also being embraced across Europe.

Data centres at the heart of the AI arms race

Last year, datacentres were the great unknowns of the high-tech world.

This year because of AI they are at the top of the political agenda with both US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Sir Kier Starmer already laying out ambitious plans to build high speed data networks.

The UK Premier announced earlier this year an investment of over £20 bn in creating a UK AI data centre, superhighway.  While at the UK Government’s International Investment Summit last October even more money was earmarked for AI infrastructure. With the IT company Blackstone committing to a massive £10 bn AI data centre in Blyth in Northumberland and the US company Amazon Web Services pledging £8 bn on AI development.

In the US Donald Trump has dwarfed this announcing a staggering $500 bn Stargate project.

Developments Europe has matched. On the 10^th of February, 2025, at the Paris AI Safety Summit, President Emmanuel Macron announced France would be spending €109 bn on data centres and AI over the next four years, an equivalent amount he stressed, in terms of population, to that being spent by the US.

Planning infrastructure at the heart of our AI future

Two days later at the end of the Paris AI Summit, the EU President Ursula Von Der Leyen announced, “The AI race is far from over,” in a speech, declaring further tens of billions of AI investment.

An announcement that followed the private €150 billion EU AI Champions initiative revealed the day before. Von Der Leyen added that an invest AI initiative would “top up” these investments by €50 billion, making it the largest public-private partnership in the world.

It’s a race that is increasingly leading to calls for regulation and control, which until the Paris Summit, had led to broad international agreement. One dismantled by the US Vice President JD Vance, in a speech in Munich immediately afterwards. Interpreted by many as fighting the cause of the US big tech companies, like Google, Meta, and Amazon, Vance said it was essential if AI is to develop, for the technology to be regulation free.

It’s a whirlwind of pledges, announcements, statements and counter declarations that, according to Dr Azfar Aslam, Nokia’s head of research now hide a massive issue. What to do.

Nokia was a mobile phone company that has now morphed into an international telecommunications company, a move forced upon it by the collapse of its dominant position in the mobile phone market.

An experience that threw it back to reinventing itself through its understanding of the underlying mobile phone infrastructure, and the company’s move into telecoms infrastructure.

Designing the new world

It’s something Dr Aslam says that we will now have to do if we are to avoid the very real problems stressed by Professor Chien.

“What you’ve got to look at is that this is an infrastructure that has evolved which was a technology that followed a business problem. We now need to pay more attention to the infrastructure build and have a structured approach to make sure we pay sufficient attention to it as a critical infrastructure. If you think about the wider economy, the society. It’s staggering. Economies run on this infrastructure, societies run on this infrastructure, government and defence now run on this infrastructure.
“We need a strategic plan to be able to meet future requirements, there’s got to be a structured approach. We are seeing that across the world in certain countries and regions and Europe is one of those. If you look at these innovations in the renewable sites where companies have started to test out these technologies.

“We’re working with a customer in Norway, for example, that is building data centres close to national resources for cooling and water and renewable energy in the same location. I think as these capabilities mature; we will see a more data centres in these renewable locations. Obviously not all locations will be suitable, but at least the trend is starting.”

To listen to the PassW0rd programme, click on the link below.

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Twins that, according to some, will either rob us of our jobs or give us new roles that will free us from the constraints of the old offline world.

The programme explores these contradictory claims of wholesale redundancy and those of a new world of work with interviews from leading industry figures from the worlds of AI and employment. And tries to piece together whether the world of technology will be one of unremitting gloom, or one where we will carry out tasks that actually give us, a stake in the future.

A new work world from digital twins

Among others, we spoke to Nvidia’s leading virtual world technologist, Richard Kerris, top AI scientist Mona Nia of Tecnotree, Ott Velsberg, Estonia’s Chief Data Officer, business transformation and employment guru Richard Skellett, and computer games and AI ethicist Anneloes Smitsman to try to work out whether work is actually a word we will use for what we do in the future, or whether it is something we will nurse fond memories of from the past.

We also feature one of the most uplifting recent stories of the internet. The poignant life story of Mats Steen, whose tragically short life has been made into an award-winning film, called Ibelin, by Benjamin Rees for Netflix, due for release on October 25^th.

In an interview with Mat’s father Robert, he lays out the life of his chronically disabled and terminally ill son, who was confined to a wheelchair and only capable of the merest of movements at the end of his life.

A virtual life well-loved and lived

Yet those were movements he made the most of, to create a character in World of Warcraft that allowed Mats to have an alternative existence as Ibelin. A pony-tailed, Thor like man who ranged through the role-playing game in such a way that he made hundreds of friends.

A fact Robert Steen only discovered ten days after Mats died in 2014 at the age of 25, when he was shocked to find that many of those Mats had met as Ibelin had made their way across Europe to be at his funeral in Oslo in Norway.

People with whom he had very real relationships.

According to Steen, one who he met at the funeral was Anne, a 62-year-old entrepreneur and psychologist from Salisbury in the UK, who worked as a headhunter in Europe. Anne told Steen about the social life his son enjoyed as an avatar in the game.

Free from real world physical constraints

Talking, eating, virtually of course, running around lakes. Competing and teasing each other.

“She said that most of the time we are in a kind of traditional social relationship. It is not about killing each other. It’s a life very much the same as we experience in the physical world, but there is one big difference. That is, that your physical appearance doesn’t play any role at all, because we can’t see each other.

“Which means that the colour of your skin has absolutely no importance. Your makeup, the clothes, are not visible. So over a long period of time, and we spent between 15 and 20,000 hours together over a 10-year period. When you come into a relationship with a person over such a long period of time. The only thing that remains is what you have in your heart and what you have in your head,” Steen said Anne told him.

The listen to the latest edition of PassW0rd click on the play button below

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In June, alone 37 companies and organisations around the globe announced that they had been the victims of a cyberattack of which five were significant health organisations. While according to a report from Associated Press, the US is losing billions to online fraud, citing a figure from the US Securities and Exchange Commission of $137 billion in 2022.

Following Future Intelligence’s PassW0rd radio programme ‘Cybercrime and punishment’ highlighting that the patience of Western governments had become exhausted by the number of ransomware attacks, a number of commentators have suggested that physical retaliation may need to be considered to counter the cyber crime wave.

Cyber crime increasing geopolitical tensions

In one incident of note, the Russian supermarket chain, Verny, was also attacked so that it was unable to process digital payments. No ransom was demanded, and no group took responsibility, provoking speculation that it could have been a tit-for-tat response for the attacks on the West. The Verny attack was one of two that occurred in Russia last month. If the claims of tit-for-tat response are true, it risks raising geopolitical tension and escalation.

The sheer scale of the attacks on Western companies is now provoking open calls for action.

Speaking in the PassW0rd programme the Finnish billionaire Risto Siilasmaa, founder of the cybersecurity company With Secure and the man credited with turning around the fortunes of the mobile phone company Nokia said that there was a need to change the way we respond to cyber incidents and acknowledge their very real-world consequences.

“It’s a mystery to me why we are not doing that as we know for sure that, for example, Russia has been very diligently trying to make people lose trust in the core societal systems like the judicial system or parts of the political system that are essential to our societies, and we just watch from the side. We don’t react, we don’t retaliate in any way.

“If we have a small shooting incident at the border, we are all up in arms, and it’s very, very serious, and we talk about it in the media for days and days. We should issue sanctions, for example, for cyberattacks or attempt to influence elections. We need to take it as seriously as it truly is.”

Targetting the cyber criminals

An exasperation echoed by Microsoft President Brad Smith at a congressional hearing on the 13^th of June, who stated that the U.S. government needs to “draw red lines” so it is clear to the world “what they cannot do without accountability.” 

“We need collective action with the private and public sector and with allied governments so that when those red lines are crossed, there is a public response and people know what has happened,” he said. “We need to start defining some consequences right now because these threat actors are living in a world where they are not facing consequences.”

Red lines that US leaders had identified over a decade ago. Speaking in a 2014 interview with PassW0rd, the then acting US Cyber Security Czar Melissa Hathaway, said that she felt that the US should make sure that cyber criminals were aware that certain areas such as hospitals were sacrosanct and that attacks on them would draw an immediate physical response.

Consequences that some say should include using practices like extraordinary rendition, the kidnapping of cyber criminals. A process fraught with diplomatic difficulties, but one given the amount of cyber criminals now on sanctions lists that may become increasingly likely. In May, a coalition of police forces including the UK National Crime Agency and the US FBI announced they had disrupted a Russian crime group known as Lockbit, which was responsible for around $1 billion of ransomware attacks. The group’s leader, Dmitry Khoroshev, has had his identity revealed and has been added to international sanctions lists. A reward of $10 million has been offered for information leading to Khoroshev’s capture by the US authorities.

Crime wave targetting hospital patients

In the latest spate of attacks in June, over 37 organisations world-wide revealed that their systems had been attacked by hackers, five of them health systems including the UK’s National Health Service.

The attack on two NHS hospital trusts in London crippled King’s College Hospital, Guy’s Hospital, St Thomas’ Hospital, Royal Brompton Hospital, and Evelina London Children’s Hospital. It caused the postponement of more than 800 planned operations and 700 outpatient appointments. The attacks effected cancer patients and people needing organ transplants and is thought to be the work of Qilin, a Russian cybercrime gang, which demanded $50 million to restore the systems.

The gang attacked the hospitals via computers run by Synnovis, a company which provides pathology services to hospitals and GP surgeries in the capital.

Also attacked in June’s cyber crime wave in the US was the giant Change Healthcare, Ascension Healthcare, and Geisinger Healthcare, while elsewhere the South African National Health Laboratory Service was also hit provoking concern that the criminal groups were homing in on health systems due to the urgency of freeing up patient data and their vulnerability due to antiquated systems and poor security.

“The healthcare industry in particular is really old, meaning the software, the computer infrastructure is really dated and a lot of them are hard to update, and it’s caused a little bit of a conundrum here where you have hackers really accelerating their attacks and their technological ability,” said Steve McKeon, an expert on healthcare systems and the CEO of MacGyver Tech.

“On the other side, you have the healthcare industry really not stepping up their game at the same level as the hackers are. Unfortunately, I think it’s going to take government oversight for that to happen because most of these companies see security as a burden and not as something that should be top of their list of priorities.”

Attacks spark calls for improved cybersecurity

Many of those interviewed for the PassW0rd programme, pointed out that problems with attribution mean that there are huge dangers associated with retaliation using kinetic weapons such as missiles, a factor underlined by Simon Hodgkinson, a former head of cybersecurity for the oil giant BP, who is a strategic adviser to the cybersecurity company Semperis.

“Some criminal gangs are harboured by nations, but that doesn’t mean they’re physically there. Even if you can attribute the attack to a nation. We’ve seen quite a few comments from the US government about China recently. But even if you can directly attribute that, that doesn’t necessarily mean the actors are there.
I have seen attacks coming in from proxies. So potentially Iranians acting on behalf of Russians, because you’re looking at the tactics, techniques and procedures and saying, well, that’s attributed to that threat actor, but it’s coming through Russian infrastructure.

 So, attribution is going to be difficult, and people would have to be really convinced before it escalates into kinetic space that this was directed by a state government,” said Hodgkinson, pointing out that the only real indications that he had seen came about due to the impact of sanctions.

“I saw a direct correlation whenever anybody applied trade sanctions in response to attacks from certain countries. So North Korea when the trade sanctions increased, you’d see more cyber, cybercrime. Iran, when their sanctions were really turned up in 2018, we saw so many more attacks because cyber was a mechanism for funding Iran’s economy.

The NATO position

The possibility of a kinetic response to a cyber-attack was first raised by NATO in 2010 but has slipped down the agenda until now. The announcement of the NATO policy, first published by Future Intelligence and The Sunday Times, followed a series of Russian-linked cyber crime wave attacks against NATO members and warnings from intelligence services of the growing threat from China. A team of NATO experts led by Madeleine Albright, the former US Secretary of State, has warned that the next attack on a NATO country “may well come down a fibre-optic cable”.

A report by Albright’s group said that a cyber-attack on the critical infrastructure of a NATO country could equate to an armed attack, justifying retaliation.

Article 5 is the cornerstone of the 1949 NATO charter, laying down that “an armed attack” against one or more NATO countries “shall be considered an attack against them all”.

“A large-scale attack on NATO’s command and control systems or energy grids could possibly lead to collective defence measures under article 5,” the experts said, suggesting where Microsoft’s Brad Smith might lay out some red lines.

The debate over whether a physical response is needed is not a new one. In 2009, The UK and US Governments started work on “strikeback.” An initiative to hit back at the hackers in response to the unprecedented level of attacks being suffered from hacking groups in China, Russia and North Korea, which were suspected of being state sponsored. Among intelligence circles in Washington, DC, at the time the idea of hitting back at foreign hacking groups was being described as the hottest topic in cyberspace though one that only recently seen results when Khoroshev’s Lockbit group was taken down by the authorities.

New guidelines on cyber resilience expected

Though in the face of the current cyber crime wave, most experts are cautioning resilience and cyber crime best practices as the solution. A policy rumoured to about to be announced by the UK’s new Labour administration in the King’s Speech, which is expected to set out minimum cybersecurity standards for hospitals and those companies involved in the data supply chains for health services.

“We really must start looking at cybersecurity from a resiliency perspective. And we must change the way that we operate. Threat actors know what’s valuable. They know in the US, Social Security numbers are valuable, and in the US, we’ve tied Social Security numbers to everything. So, we until we really stop tying all that information, and we devalue what it is, they’re getting their hands on, they’re still going to see value in it,” said Melissa Ventrone, who is the head of the Chicago law practice Clark Hill’s cybersecurity team, and a specialist in ransomware recovery.

“On this concept of resiliency, if we could come up with a concept that enables or helps in the healthcare space. Let’s say a hospital gets hit by ransomware, are there facilities that we can set up that they could plug into almost immediately to continue providing the care and when they’re back up then it gets transferred back over?

“If you have a business, you should be required to have this resiliency concept. So, if something does happen, then you can still continue to operate, provide services to consumers, customers, and businesses. It should be mandated.”

The post Cyber crime wave provokes backlash appeared first on Future Intelligence.

The incident involved an employee working in Hong Kong for the London based engineering and design firm who was tricked into sending the money to cyber criminals during a video call.

The criminals used video content generated by artificial intelligence to pose as senior company members and use fake images and voices to dupe the employee into transferring the funds.

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Future Intelligence exclusive from the Benevolent Artificial General Intelligence Conference in Panama

Some of the world’s leading ethicists are calling for a supranational body to control AGI development in similar ways to those used to oversee, nuclear weapons and genetics.

The push for some form of control of Artificial General Intelligence, a form of the technology likely to be able to approach awareness, which started at the Benevolent Artificial General Intelligence Conference in Panama in March, has come amid growing concerns about the uncertain impact of the technology.

Chief among those concerns in the short-term are job losses to AI but much deeper fears about a loss of control to a super-intelligent system, inability to understand how it works and a loss of human confidence in the face of such technology have also emerged according to the philosopher and futurist Jerome Glenn, the Director of the Millennium Project who was one of the speakers at the event.

“One of my concerns is that people are not aware of how soon AI could evolve beyond what they think today, so they’re not taking seriously what it might look like and what sort of rules we might need. There have been meetings of UNESCO and there’s been OECD. The White House has got some rules. Chinas got some rules. The EU’s got some rules, but they’re mostly focused on the narrow intelligence we have today. They’re not anticipating the future artificial general intelligence that we can have tomorrow,” said Glenn, a former associate of the renowned thinker Alvin Toffler, and one of the architects of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks which limited nuclear weapons in 1979.

Potentially dangerous AI too close for comfort

Speaking in an exclusive interview with the Future Intelligence’s, ‘PassW0rd‘ radio programme ‘In AI We Trust’, Glenn went on to say why there was a need for a similar treaty to the SALT debate to govern AI and specifically Artificial General Intelligence rather than the narrow general intelligence we think of as AI that we have become aware of in the last two years.

“Several years ago, we thought, artificial general intelligence is ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now. Now people aren’t saying that it’s much sooner, so to get national rules and UN rules it would be a miracle if we got them done in a couple of years, but that’s what we’re going to have to do.

“If AGI could be released in, say, three to five years, and if we don’t have something in place that helps manage that, how it gets done and released, then unregulated AGI by many different countries it seems to me it’s not likely that will turn out OK and that could be a mess for future civilizations. So, to prevent that, we got to have serious conversations about future rules, about systems that don’t exist yet.”

Glenn, whose Millennium Project is backed by Vint Cerf, one of the architects of the internet, is making representations to the UN and a number of other extra-national organisations in a bid to bring about a supranational body to control AGI development.

An attempt beginning to receive a great deal of support since concerns about AI technology were first mooted by Risto Siilasmaa, the Finnish former chief executive of Nokia and the cybersecurity company WithSecure, who went on a self-funded world tour to alert national leaders of the danger from the technology.

A constitution for AGI and supranational body

Joining Glenn in Panama was the lawyer, and entrepreneur, Anneloes Smitsman. Smitsman, whose latest venture is an ethical computer game called Elowyn, said there was an urgent need to bring together the various competing AI regulation initiatives in the US, the EU, China and the UK all under one umbrella to address the issue of AI development. To that end, Smitsman is developing a framework with the aim of creating a global constitution for AGI development.

“That’s exactly why this participatory framework for guiding the creation of an AGI constitution is about. It’s to say let’s unite, let’s put it all together. Let’s really look here. What is complementary?

“Also, to understand that the approach towards narrow AI may not work for AGI and I don’t think that’s sufficiently on the agenda or even in people’s minds so.

“I think one of the danger points could be to think that we’ve got this figured out now with narrow AI, and we have regulations in place and there are agreements here and then the baby AGI emerges, and it’s a completely different ball game.

“So, we are proposing to stretch our thinking around this and to start to come towards, well agreed, formulated and implementable common good governance principles,” said Smitsman who has set up a steering committee to present the framework to organisations like the UN, the OECD and the EU.

For more on AI regulation and a supranational body to control AGI, see:

AI experts call for regulator – Future Intelligence

Techlash: the end of the internet dream? – Future Intelligence

Top tech lawyer calls for Roman Slave Law and agency to control AI use – Future Intelligence

Omniverse – virtual Earth begins – Future Intelligence

The post Experts want AGI supranational body appeared first on Future Intelligence.

According to Warwick University’s Professor Irene Ng, one of the world’s leading authorities on data privacy, the activities of the big tech companies in developing AI, are creating huge issues regarding the ‘ownership’ of personal data.

Speaking in an interview for the PassW0rd radio programme ‘Who Owns You’, Professor Ng, who is also the chief executive of Dataswift, a company championing the development of personal data stores called the Hub of All Things, says that there are very real risks to privacy due to the rapidly emerging technology, adding that the public’s awareness of how data is used by big tech has to be raised.

“The problem starts when you collect data, when you store it and when you process it, that is the part where AI comes in because it is doing the processing. Most people make all these assumptions about where data is collected and where is it stored, and that understanding is very simplistic because they think about it in a real-world way. People think that the data is obtained from one place and that it is then mixed up by a computer and is used to build something a little like bricks and a house, but that is where that understanding departs from what happens because that does not happen,” said Professor Ng, adding that we must be given control of our data to know how it’s being used.

The data that’s you

“If you take the last number of your passport, and you change it, digitally, you’re a completely different person. That’s your personal data. If you take the last number of your Fitbit steps today and change it, it doesn’t matter. Both of those are your personal data, so it becomes all about context.

“The thing about data is that it has a few dimensions, on its own, it can be very potent. It also can become harmless when combined with other data and become inert. While on the other hand inert data that’s personal, can become very potent, data when combined with other data could lose its meaning in some ways. This then is all about relevance, meaning and context. But when you don’t understand this about data, we are now confusing, the medium and the message.”

According to Professor Ng, AI’s insatiable appetite for data means that large amounts of personal data could be used for purposes we are unaware of and have not given permission for because of the technology’s practice of making multiple copies of data.

The fight for our lives

It’s an awareness of data ownership that in an era of deep-fakes soon will see people asserting ownership of their faces, fingerprints, voices and other biometrics one of the issues involved in the recent Hollywood actors strike, when film extras demonstrated for the right to own their own images.

A point over essential copyright highlighted by a legal dispute between the New York Times and Microsoft that began at the start of the year. According to the newspaper, Microsoft and its partner, OpenAI, had breached its copyright to train AI systems like ChatGPT by generating multiple copies of articles from the publisher’s website.

The New York Times is not alone, several UK national newspapers are also rumoured to be taking the US tech giant to court for similar infringements.

A dispute the US East Coast media lawyer Kevin Casini says will revolve around an expensive argument about what a copy actually is.

To be or not to be

“It will or may come down to the definition of copy. What does it mean to actually make a copy? You and I have very base level understanding, walking around knowledge of what a copy is right it’s a mimeograph, or it’s a reproduction. It’s essentially taking one thing and making another version,” said Casini, adding that the New York Times case was being viewed as the start of things to come as more and more people begin to realise how their data is being used.

A point that US legal expert Colin Levy, author of ‘The Legal Tech Ecosystem’ says will eventually lead to people disputing with Facebook and other social media companies over the way they use our data.

“Facebook has long used our data and what we post for its own purposes and the fact that only now people are objecting or paying more attention to it, I think means that they weren’t paying attention in the beginning. If Facebook was trying to make money from us by charging us, then it would be clearer what its intentions were.”

Who owns you

“So, ultimately, there are a lot of unresolved issues with respect to the ownership of ourselves. But ultimately, we do own ourselves. It’s just a matter of how much we want to share ourselves with others, whether it’s other people, other tools and so on.”

It’s a debate about data ownership that has finally begun to draw in legislators like UK Labour Peer Lord Jim Knight.

“I’ve become interested in whether we can form data trusts that essentially allow us, as citizens, effectively to aggregate our data. To have the use of that data governed by a set of principles written into the trust that trustees then have to abide by in terms of the exploitation of that data by other people. Individually, our little bits of data aren’t worth that much. Collectively, they’re worth a fortune, and it’s thinking more about how we leverage our collective power over these hugely powerful big tech companies.”

The post Battle opens with big tech over data use appeared first on Future Intelligence.