Helder Matos (master’s student in Human Rights at the School of Law of the University of Minho)

Introduction

In March 2024, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) revealed that the European Commission, the institution assuming the role of global vanguard in the matter of digital rights, violated the EU’s own data protection regulation due to its structural dependency on the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.[1]

Although the EDPS closed the case in July 2025 after the Commission updated its licensing agreements with Microsoft, this episode brings to the surface the underlying problem that this article proposes to address.[2]

Even as it received the green light to proceed with business-as-usual, the European Commission admitted its deep concerns regarding the crippling dependence on a non-European company for the digital platforms needed for normal day-to-day functioning.[3] The European Union (EU) does not control the technological infrastructure it runs on, as it is forced to negotiate the terms of its own data security with foreign corporations.

Furthermore, during April 2026, the announcement of Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model perfectly highlighted the sheer geopolitical danger this paradigm poses to European sovereignty. Presented as a technology so powerful that it had to be contained, Claude Mythos can supposedly discover zero-day flaws and take over any operating system, essentially acting as a digital master-key capable of unlocking any door. Anthropic restricted the model under an initiative called Project Glasswing, releasing it only to a highly vetted coalition of US tech giants (such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA) to safeguard their own systems.[4]  Recognising the systemic threat, European institutions, most notably the banking industry, were immediately pressured to access the model so that they could protect their critical infrastructure.[5]

This caused Washington to take a few steps back. While the Pentagon had just labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk” and Donald Trump publicly called its executives “left-wing nut jobs,” the power of Claude Mythos forced their hand causing the White House to recognise that this technology is, after all, too powerful for the US government to do without.[6]

Despite all of this, on April 21, 2026, it was revealed that a small group of unauthorised users from a private Discord channel had successfully breached and accessed the Mythos model, effectively breaching one of the most “ethically secure” AI labs in the world.[7]

The one-million-euro question is: if a company like Anthropic cannot secure its most dangerous offensive cyber-weapon from a handful of Discord users, how can the EU entrust its cybersecurity and digital sovereignty to the fragile, geographically biased criteria of Silicon Valley tech companies?

The democratisation of knowledge and the decentralisation of power – the original promises of the digital age – have long collapsed. In their place arose a digital infrastructure that has been challenging the classical categories of political and legal thought, bringing the EU to an inflection point of existential proportions.

The EU currently faces the transition from a paradigm focused on the rule of law to a techno-authoritarian ecosystem, where sovereignty is progressively alienated in favour of American military and corporate interests.

The farce of ethical AI and the geopolitics of algorithmic imperialism

Progress through uncritical technological innovation, frequently sustained by the marketing departments of Silicon Valley tech giants, is an illusion. To support this claim, let us consider the case between the AI company, Anthropic, and the Pentagon, in February 2026.[8]

Anthropic, self-proclaimed as the most “ethically aligned” in the sector and often shielding itself behind its proprietary Constitutional AI – which is an internal governance mechanism that aims to align AI models with a certain set of rules and morality[9] –, initially sought to distance itself from the competition by establishing “red lines” and high accountability standards. In order to stay true to this position, it stated that it could not, in good conscience, accede to the Pentagon’s demands, which explicitly required the removal of guardrails preventing the use of their AI models in offensive military operations and mass surveillance.

DoD’s Secretary Pete Hegseth immediately responded by classifying the corporation as an “unacceptable national security risk” and a “supply chain risk” (a label never before publicly applied to an American company), raising eyebrows across the board. On the exact same day, leveraging the power vacuum, OpenAI stepped up and signed a multimillion-dollar agreement with the Pentagon, accepting the removal of these ethical barriers. This case reveals that moral objections in the face of the current American administration have severe consequences, and that you need to be aligned to survive it.[10]

However, what seemed to be moral superiority and ethics above anything else, quickly proved to be geographically limited to US borders. In a February 2026 interview following the Pentagon’s blacklisting, Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, proudly declared that his company “has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military”, bragging about their ties with the intelligence community for cyber and combat operations. Amodei clarified that their ethical exception applies specifically to domestic mass surveillance, arguing that “no one wants to be spied on by the U.S. government” justifying his position as a defense of the Fourth Amendment.

Also, when asked about the morality behind AI weaponisation, Amodei stated that “we are patriotic Americans… everything we have done has been for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security.”[11]

But what does this mean for European citizens? It means that, in this regard, fundamental rights against mass surveillance are reserved exclusively for American citizens, while the rest of the global population, including allies, are relegated to the category of raw behavioural data points and legitimate targets for extrajudicial and extraterritorial intelligence operations, validating Shoshana Zuboff’s thesis on surveillance capitalism,[12] clearly exposing the farce of “ethical AI” promoted by techno-solutionists. There is nothing ethical about omnipresent mass surveillance.

Militarization of AI and neo-reactionary thought

Moving beyond the safety-washing theatre characterised by Anthropic, the unapologetic reality of digital imperialism is best exemplified by Palantir Technologies. Palantir represents a logical consequence of Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, as it transcends the mere extraction of consumer behavioural surplus for targeted advertising by redirecting that massive data apparatus toward state coercion, evidenced by its predictive policing experiments in New Orleans and its instrumental function in powering the logistical infrastructure for mass deportations under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).[13]

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings, and Joe Lonsdale, and initially funded by the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, Palantir derives its name from the enchanted seeing stones in Lord of the Rings that are used for long-distance communication and viewing past or distant events. Palantir established itself as a preferred defence contractor with Gotham and Foundry, platforms built to synthesise fragmented intelligence and commercial data and provide semantic analysis to inform executive action.[14] The subsequent integration of generative AI served as the catalyst that skyrocketed the company’s financial valuation to unprecedented heights in late 2025.

The company has positioned itself as the “U.S. government’s central operating system” as it has secured multiple state contracts across public entities such as the DOD, FBI, IRS, NSA, and CIA.[15] In 2025, in the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, co-founder Joe Lonsdale was involved in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and Palantir’s CTO was officially appointed as a Lieutenant Colonel alongside Meta and OpenAI executives. The dividing line between corporation and State has effectively been dissolving.[16]

To understand Palantir is to understand the ideological worldview proclaimed by its founders, which emerges from neo-reactionary (NRx) thought. Peter Thiel’s philosophy is deeply intertwined with the accelerationist theories of figures like Nick Land, who believes that democratic deliberation is a fundamental obstacle to true technological optimisation.[17] Following this logic, the administrative state must be dismantled and replaced by algorithmic governance submitted to the sole interests of a techno-authoritarian elite. This kind of political thought perfectly aligns with Steve Bannon’s call for the “deconstruction of the administrative state”, thus creating a symbiotic relationship where techno-authoritarianism provides the digital infrastructure for political authoritarianism.[18]

This ideological worldview is explicitly presented to the world in the 22-point manifesto published by Palantir’s official X account on April 18, which is essentially a summary of The Technological Republic, a book by Alexander Karp, declaring, among other things, that: “the limits of soft power… have been exposed (…) hard power in this century will be built on software”; “the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin”; “the defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price (…) Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia” – conveniently opening massive new markets for its defence software; “some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”[19] This manifesto resonates with Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, which similarly glorified “war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism,” and the destruction of pacifism.[20]

With the death of traditional market dynamics, the new ruling class relies on “cloud capital”, which describes the networked algorithmic machines that grant their owners unprecedented power to colonise the state. This doctrine glorifies brute force and operates with alarming supremacist undertones by praising apartheid-inspired narratives and seeking to subjugate the masses to the “divine algorithm”, viewing vulnerable populations as inferior beings needing to be managed or eliminated.

The materialisation of this ideology is already underway and the catastrophic consequences of accelerating military protocol with automated systems were exposed during the United States’ war on Iran. In the first 24 hours of the conflict, AI tools such as Palantir’s Project Maven, were used by the US to strike over 1,000 targets at a rate of 42 suggested targets per hour. On February 28, relying on outdated satellite imagery with mere seconds to execute, an American Tomahawk cruise missile struck an Iranian elementary school, killing around 150 students and teachers. The system worked exactly as intended. Days after the attack, the Department of Defense’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer revealed that Palantir’s latest targeting workflow was as simple as “left click, right click, left click,” openly celebrating the elimination of several layers of human scrutiny.[21]

At this tactical speed, the concept of “meaningful human control” (MHC), a foundational requirement of International Humanitarian Law to ensure compliance with the Geneva Conventions’ principles of Distinction and Proportionality, becomes dead letter.[22] As AI ethicist Scott Robbins dissects, MHC is systematically annihilated by these architectures due to insurmountable psychological and epistemic limitations. Psychologically, humans simply cannot exercise moral judgment or regain situational awareness at the speed of algorithmic targeting. Epistemically, the opaque nature of machine learning means operators have no access to the considerations or statistical weights the algorithm utilises to reach its lethal outputs. When an algorithm selects 42 targets per hour based on a black-box rationale, the human operator is reduced to a mere biological rubber stamp for a machine whose logic they can neither access nor comprehend.[23]

European complicity

What does the rise of algorithmic imperialism and the digital colonisation of the State mean for the EU? The core of this crisis lies in the material reality of EU’s technological ecosystem as it is confronted with its near-absolute technological dependency. Because the EU does not own much of the physical or digital infrastructure it operates on, it remains deeply dependent on American technology for critical capabilities such as cloud and intelligence software. Consequently, the EU deals with a volatile geopolitical landscape where US foreign policy can shift abruptly. That’s a risk that must be actively mitigated.[24]

The EU’s legislative attempts to counter this situation are proving to be inherently insufficient. A prime example is the AI Act [Regulation (EU) 2024/1689]. While it was presented as the global gold standard for AI regulation, its structure contains a fatal blind spot as it exempts AI systems for national security and military purposes from its jurisdictional control.[25] This means that EU’s regulation on AI becomes entirely performative the moment military prerogatives are invoked.

When it comes to the broader civil sphere, the Digital Services Act (DSA) was theoretically designed to tackle the ideological degradation of the public sphere, a space now almost entirely colonised by American tech giants. However, this regulatory framework fails to grasp the ontological violence of what philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes as Infocracy, a regime where factual discourse is actively replaced by viral, polarised noise.[26] This was well articulated by Pope Leo XIV, who issued a public statement regarding how these systems inherently permeate our mentality and social environments:

“When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”[27]

Faced with technology that fundamentally alters the human relationship with truth, the DSA does not challenge the architecture creating these self-referential circuits. Instead, it outsources the mitigation of systemic risks to the exact same platforms whose financial success depends on the proliferation of that very risk by profiting from the destruction of truth.[28]

Furthermore, as the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ratified in the Schrems II judgment, international data transfer frameworks are functionally impotent as the United States’ CLOUD Act oblige US-based service providers to make data hosted in the EU available to US intelligence agencies anyway.[29]

The Chatcontrol proposal acts as the ultimate vector for techno-authoritarianism as it is aimed at the implementation of Client-Side Scanning (CSS) technologies directly onto citizens’ devices, intercepting private communications before the encryption process even begins. This would completely reverse the presumption of innocence and violate the principle of data minimisation.[30] Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) explicitly stipulated in Podchasov v. Russia that the deliberate weakening of encryption harms democratic society,[31] EU institutions insist on seeking mass surveillance legislation. Also, Neziha Akalin and Alberto Giaretta warn that the normalisation of Chatcontrol in mobile phones will inevitably pave the way to Robotcontrol in domestic “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices, dictating the absolute end of the sanctuary of the home.[32]

Simultaneously, the Digital Omnibus legislative package acts as a perfect Trojan horse by utilising the pretext of “administrative simplification” to boost AI competitiveness as it actively dilutes data protection rules. As noted by Douwe Korff, Digital Omnibus legalises the unrestricted extraction of European data under the generic pretext of the industry’s “legitimate interests” for commercial AI training, relegating fundamental human rights to mere bureaucratic obstacles.[33]

Observing this deliberate erosion of digital rights alongside the structural dependency on foreign tech giants, the reality of the European predicament becomes clear. To frame this crisis exclusively as a product of United States’ imperialism would be to indulge in a fallacy of European innocence, while the reality is that the EU has been an active accomplice in the construction of its own algorithmic cage.

The (avoidable) tragedy of the digital tenant

Because the EU operates under the principle of legal harmonisation, the structural vulnerabilities engineered in Brussels inevitably cascade into the domestic spheres of the Member States. Portugal serves as a prime case study of this top-down uncritical techno-solutionism, where national modernisation efforts collide head-on with the reality of infrastructural dependency.

The contemporary neoliberal consensus dictates that states should not worry about this dependency, asserting that technology is inherently neutral and that the market will self-regulate. The material reality, however, is diametrically opposed. Today, the critical services that keep Portuguese society functioning, such as schools, hospitals, the justice system, social security, and the public administration itself, depend entirely on data flows and computer systems hosted on infrastructures controlled by foreign Big Tech companies.

When the Portuguese government promotes modernisation policies such as the National Digital Strategy that establishes the goal of implementing digital twins to monitor urban life in order to transition cities to the status of Smart Cities,[34] it necessarily invites home the architecture of imperialist control. This dependency is tangible and carries stratospheric costs. Every year, the Portuguese State spends nearly 70% of its software licensing budget (between 150 and 200 million euros) on a single American company: Microsoft. It is public money exported in exchange for systemic dependency. Handing over the logistical and civil mapping of the country to foreign corporations results in a concentration of political and economic power outside any effective democratic control, effectively outsourcing the State’s capacity to govern itself. In this scenario of structural fragility, the State assumes the condition of a mere digital tenant.

The counter-offensive

While the current trajectory leans heavily toward algorithmic captivity, it is not an inescapable fate. Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein assert that “all rights are positive”, meaning that fundamental rights are hollow without the active institutional and financial investment of the State to protect them.[35] In this instance, the right to digital privacy cannot be secured merely by passing regulations as it demands that the State actively spend financial resources to build and maintain the physical infrastructure necessary to enforce it.

To shield the EU from this techno-authoritarian drift and break free from infrastructural dependency, our defence must operate both on legal and material levels:

Regarding the legal level, the defence lies in the judicial authority of the CJEU. In December 2025, the CJEU paved the way for the full justiciability of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) in the Commission v. Poland judgment (C-448/23).[36] By deciding that the values enshrined in Article 2 TEU, such as respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and human rights, are not mere political guidelines but “legally binding and enforceable obligations,” the Court cemented the primacy of EU law against autocratic drift. This ruling grants civil society the concrete legal mechanism to systematically challenge and invalidate predatory surveillance legislation like Chatcontrol or the Digital Omnibus by invoking their constitutional incompatibility with European values.[37] However, the ruling of the law remains insufficient against American corporate giants if the EU does not build its own physical infrastructure.

Naturally, achieving technological sovereignty overnight is a logistical impossibility given that one cannot simply unplug from Microsoft or AWS tomorrow without paralysing business, civil administration and, consequently, everything else. Transitioning from these monopolistic fiefdoms to sovereign systems demands the imposition of the systemic interoperability proclaimed by Cory Doctorow to mitigate artificial switching costs and vendor lock-in.[38] By legally forcing closed American platforms to communicate seamlessly with third-party European systems, the EU can break open these so-called “walled gardens” and allow public administrations to safely migrate to sovereign clouds without risking operational collapse during the transition.

In a broader sense, to solve a crisis engineered by the neoliberal consensus, the EU cannot rely on the very ideological tools that built its cage. The defence on the material level requires a radical shift in Europe’s economic and industrial strategy. Escaping the trap of the digital tenant requires abandoning the dogmatic belief that the free market will organically resolve Europe’s infrastructural dependency. Here, the theoretical framework provided by Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell regarding cybernetic economic planning gives us some clues. Their thesis asserts that modern computational power allows for highly efficient, deliberate economic planning that overtakes the blind and often monopolistic forces of the free market.[39]

However, computational planning alone is insufficient without bold structural investment. This vision goes hand-in-hand with Mariana Mazzucato’s thesis on the “Entrepreneurial State”, which demonstrates that in order to achieve major technological breakthroughs, the State must act as a proactive risk-taker and market-creator.[40] Applied to the current European crisis of technological sovereignty, this means that the EU must stop waiting for a domestic equivalent to Silicon Valley to miraculously emerge through private venture capital. Instead, under this paradigm, the EU engages in deliberate, large-scale planning through the injection of massive public capital to purposefully engineer a native ecosystem of hardware and open-source software from the ground up.

To properly overcome this crisis, the EU must acknowledge its own complicity. By embedding military exemptions into crucial regulations, by entrusting the public sphere to monopolies, and actively pursuing mass surveillance with proposals like Chatcontrol and Digital Omnibus, the EU is facilitating its own captivity. Furthermore, by outsourcing the critical functions of civil administration to foreign Big Tech, Member States are progressively abandoning their autonomy, assuming the fragile condition of mere “digital tenants” renting their capacity to function.

The safeguarding of human dignity resides in rejecting the inevitability of this techno-authoritarian drift. Democracy will survive only if Law masters Technology, and not the other way around. In the 21st century, full emancipation demands the recognition that technological sovereignty is a non-negotiable condition of democracy itself.

As Shoshana Zuboff puts it, “How did they get away with it?”[41]

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[1] European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), “European Commission’s use of Microsoft 365 infringes data protection law for EU institutions and bodies,” Press Release, March 11, 2024, https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2024/european-commissions-use-microsoft-365-infringes-data-protection-law-eu-institutions-and-bodies_en.

[2] European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS), “European Commission brings use of Microsoft 365 into compliance with data protection rules for EU institutions and bodies,” Press Release, July 28, 2025, https://www.edps.europa.eu/press-publications/press-news/press-releases/2025/european-commission-brings-use-microsoft-365-compliance-data-protection-rules-eu-institutions-and-bodies_en.

[3] Claudie Moreau, “EU’s privacy supervisor clears Commission’s use of Microsoft,” Euractiv, July 28, 2025, https://www.euractiv.com/news/eus-privacy-supervisor-clears-commissions-use-of-microsoft/.

[4] Anthropic, “Introducing Project Glasswing,” April 7, 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing.

[5] “The Guardian view on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos: when AI finds every flaw, who controls the Internet?,” The Guardian, April 23, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/apr/23/the-guardian-view-on-anthropics-claude-mythos-when-ai-finds-every-flaw-who-controls-the-internet.

[6]   Kali Hays and Lily Jamali, “White House and Anthropic Hold ‘Productive’ Meeting Amid Fears Over Mythos Model,” BBC News, April 2026, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyv10e1d13po.

[7] Rachel Metz, “Anthropic’s Mythos model is being accessed by unauthorized users,” Bloomberg News, April 21, 2026, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/anthropic-s-mythos-model-is-being-accessed-by-unauthorized-users.

[8] Sanya Mansoor, “Anthropic’s AI model Claude gets popularity boost after US military feud,” The Guardian, March 2, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/02/claude-anthropic-ai-pentagon.

[9] Aman Priyanshu, Yash Maurya, and Zuofei Hong, “AI Governance and accountability: an analysis of Anthropic’s Claude,” arXiv preprint, arXiv:2407.01557v1 (May 2, 2024), https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01557.

[10] Mansoor, “Anthropic’s AI model Claude gets popularity boost.”

[11] Dario Amodei, “Full transcript of our interview with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei,” interview by Jo Ling Kent, CBS News, February 28, 2026, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/anthropic-ceo-dario-amodei-full-transcript/.

[12] Shoshana Zuboff, The age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).

[13] Patrícia Alexandra Gonçalves Névoa, “Capitalismo de Vigilância: o Caso de Palantir Technologies Inc. em análise (2001-2023)”, (Master’s diss., University of Minho, 2024).

[14] Patrícia Alexandra Gonçalves Névoa, “Capitalismo de Vigilância: o Caso de Palantir…”.

[15] More Perfect Union, “I worked at Palantir: the tech company reshaping reality,” April 17, 2025, YouTube video, 10:41, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ95Gmvg_D4.

[16] Steven Levy, “What Lt. Col. Boz and Big Tech’s enlisted execs will do in the army,” Wired, June 20, 2025, https://www.wired.com/story/what-lt-col-boz-and-big-techs-enlisted-execs-will-do-in-the-army/.

[17] Andy Beckett, “Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in,” The Guardian, May 11, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationism-how-a-fringe-philosophy-predicted-the-future-we-live-in.

[18] Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon vows a daily fight for ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’,” The Washington Post, February 23, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/top-wh-strategist-vows-a-daily-fight-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/2017/02/23/03f6b8da-f9ea-11e6-bf01-d47f8cf9b643_story.html.

[19] Palantir Technologies (@PalantirTech), “The limits of soft power… have been exposed,” X (formerly Twitter), April 18, 2026, https://x.com/PalantirTech/status/2045574398573453312.

[20] Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The futurist manifesto,” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909.

[21] Sheera Frenkel, Paul Mozur, and Adam Satariano, “Mutually automated destruction: the escalating global A.I. arms race,” The New York Times, April 12, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/technology/china-russia-us-ai-weapons.html.

[22] International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Autonomy, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics: Technical Aspects of Human Control (Geneva: ICRC, 2019).

[23] Scott Robbins, “The many meanings of meaningful human control,” AI and Ethics 4 (2024): 1377–1388, https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-023-00320-6.

[24] Bruno Castro, “Europa: entre a passividade tecnológica e a soberania de defesa que tarda em chegar,” Líder, March 13, 2026, https://sapo.pt/artigo/europa-entre-a-passividade-tecnologica-e-a-soberania-de-defesa-que-tarda-em-chegar-69b3b62d3d53858f4452f4f4.

[25] European Union, Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council (AI Act), Official Journal of the European Union, July 12, 2024.

[26] Byung-Chul Han, Infocracy: digitalization and the crisis of democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).

[27] Pope Leo XIV (@pontifex), “Artificial Intelligence systems increasingly shape and permeate our mentality…,” X (formerly Twitter), April 17, 2026, https://x.com/Pontifex/status/2045208457440059414.

[28] European Union, Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (Digital Services Act), October 27, 2022.

[29] Judgment CJEU Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland Ltd and Maximillian Schrems (Schrems II), 16 July 2020, case C-311/18, ECLI:EU:C:2020:559.

[30] Council of the European Union, Proposal for a Regulation laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse (Chatcontrol), Interinstitutional File 2022/0155 (COD), November 13, 2025.

[31] Judgment ECtHR Podchasov v. Russia, 13 February 2024, application no. 33696/19.

[32] Neziha Akalin and Alberto Giaretta, “From chat control to robot control: the backdoors left open for the sake of safety,” arXiv preprint, 2026.

[33] Douwe Korff, “Digital Omnibus: proposed changes to the definition of personal data in the EU GDPR analysed in the light of the SRB and earlier CJEU Judgments”, 2025, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5891404; European Commission, Proposal for a Regulation (Digital Omnibus), COM(2025) 837 final, November 19, 2025.

[34] República Portuguesa, Estratégia Digital Nacional (2024), 76.

[35] Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, The cost of rights: why liberty depends on taxes (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

[36] Judgment CJEU European Commission v. Republic of Poland, 18 December 2025, case C-448/23, ECLI:EU:C:2025:975.

[37] Gonçalo Martins de Matos, “Glimpsing the tunnel exit: the justiciability of Article 2 TEU and the future of the European Union,” The Official Blog of UNIO, April 3, 2026, https://officialblogofunio.com/2026/04/03/glimpsing-the-tunnel-exit-the-justiciability-of-article-2-teu-and-the-future-of-the-european-union/.

[38] Cory Doctorow, The Internet con: how to seize the means of computation (London: Verso Books, 2023).

[39] W. Paul Cockshott and Allin F. Cottrell, Towards a new socialism (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1993).

[40] Mariana Mazzucato, The entrepreneurial state: debunking public vs. private sector myths (London: Anthem Press, 2014).

[41] Zuboff, The age of surveillance capitalism.

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Picture credit: by Google DeepMind on pexels.com.