Kubernetes & Cloud Native · 20.08.2026, 13:02 UTC
German ciphers, telegrams, and cloud native data sovereignty
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Kubernetes & Cloud Native |
| Quelle | CNCF ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 20.08.2026 UTC |
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A lesson from 1917
In January 1917, Germany sent a secret telegram.
It went to Mexico. The offer: join the war against the United States, and you can have Texas, Arizona and New Mexico back. The Germans were careful, and they put it in a cipherin cipher.
Their own transatlantic cables had been cut, so they sent it the only convenient way left, down lines that ran through British territory, part of it on an American cable.
The cable was described as private. Contractually, and because they had encoded the message.
Except Britain was quietly tapping those wires. A room of codebreakers in the Admiralty, Room 40, read the whole thing. Six weeks later, it was on the front page of every American newspaper. Not long after, the United States was at war.
It doesn’t matter whose message it is. If it runs on infrastructure you don’t control, whoever controls it can read it.
A modern sovereignty challenge
That century-old lesson is having a very modern moment. Earlier this year, a US hyperscaler was reported to have handed the US Congress documents belonging to regulators at two Dutch authorities: emails, minutes, meeting invites. The people whose job is enforcing Europe’s Digital Services Act against US tech.
The records were reportedly handed over with names left unredacted, in effect a ready-made list of the people holding US giants to account. Whatever the specifics, it shifts the data sovereignty picture in a way worth sitting with.
The mechanism is the US CLOUD Act. It can compel an American company to surrender data even when that data sits on European soil. In sworn …