For a Public Digital Service

The Covid crisis has given a powerful boost to digital technology in general and distance learning and working tools in particular. It’s a fact that the digital transition has become unavoidable. Its rapid deployment during the pandemic confirms the omnipresence of American technologies on all digital fronts. Nevertheless, voices are increasingly being heard at all levels in favour of a digital strategy based on a European industrial tool that guarantees the values defended by the Union, starting with respect for the privacy of its citizens. Belnet’s Jitsi Meet service, iMio’s Jitsi Visio, the BigBlueButton portal being developed by Educode and Domaine Public’s 2 Jitsi and BigBlueButton platforms are examples that should be followed and expanded.

Data surveillance

Europe is increasingly wary of the omnipresence of American industrial facilities on its soil, dreaming of local digital champions and independent digital technology. Have you heard of Palantir? Seventeen years after it was founded with CIA money (via the In-Q-Tel fund), this data surveillance specialist triumphantly floated on Wall Street at the end of September. Its business is the analysis of large quantities of data for the counter-terrorism (Gotham suite of applications) and financial (Metropolis suite of applications) sectors. The Los Angeles Police Department is a customer of Gotham, which it uses for predictive purposes to anticipate criminal threats. For the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, Palantir has developed a management and monitoring platform that centralises the data collected by the various U.S. intelligence agencies. Investigative Case Management, as it is known, has made it possible to identify and track migrants and/or asylum seekers, share information and investigate them in order to make arrests and raid their workplaces. Similarly, Amnesty International denounces the fact that the US ICE agency has used Palantir’s technology to “plan massive operations, such as in Mississippi in August 2019, in which children were separated from their parents and caregivers, causing irreparable harm to the families and communities involved. These operations have resulted in prolonged detentions and expulsions”.

Palantir is not my friend

Here we go beyond the issue of the monetisation of sensitive data, which can be understood in the case of the Gafa, to consider Europe’s sovereignty in digital matters, as raised by Dutch MEP Sophie in’t Veld in a question she drafted on 10 June on relations between Palantir and the European Union. The day before, the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, had revealed that Europool, the European Police Office, had been using Palantir since 2006 to analyse data relating to the fight against terrorism. Taking advantage of the health crisis, Palantir offered various European health agencies, including those in France (via the Paris hospitals), Germany, Switzerland and Austria, its help and expertise in tracing the virus and better dispatching resources in terms of personnel, masks, respirators and bed management. While France has declined the offer, having like Belgium decided to develop its own application, Spain and Greece have reportedly accepted Palantir’s proposal. The British government, for its part, has entrusted Palantir with the Covid 19 data of British patients. According to Dutch MEP Sophie in’t Veld, writing on the blog of the German tink tank “aboutintel.eu” in an article entitled “Palantir is not our friend”, this collaboration is dangerous in many respects.

Europe, the last bastion of privacy

“Palantir is one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial private technology companies, specialising in providing big data analysis software to governments and businesses. Its co-founder, Peter Thiel, is a technology billionaire who also happens to be the founder of Paypal and the first investor in Facebook. He pursues a decidedly right-wing political agenda, notably as a sponsor of the 2016 Trump campaign. More importantly, Palantir works for US security and intelligence agencies such as the NSA and CIA, helping the former to spy on the entire world as revealed by Edward Snowden. This is where European politicians should draw the line. A democratically legitimised body, be it a national government or the European Commission, should not facilitate the surveillance of European citizens by foreign security services. The MEP goes on to call for Palantir to be sidelined from Europe’s digital fabric and for the development of strategic technological independence, in order to assert and assume its status as “the last bastion of privacy”.

A free European administration

The European Union administration reiterates this desire for independence in a communication dated 21 October entitled “Open Source Software Strategy 2020-2023”: “Thanks to open source software, we can build new innovative digital solutions in support of our common policies and actions, and work towards technological sovereignty. Thanks to open code, innovation is progressive and based on the sharing of knowledge and skills. Openness also increases confidence in public services. It offers greater scope for enhancing security, since the code can be freely inspected and improved. According to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, “while it may be too late to reproduce digital giants, there is still time to achieve technological sovereignty in certain key areas”. And the EU is calling on public authorities in the Member States to follow suit: “Public administrations should not only use open source software, but also, as far as possible, contribute to the relevant developer communities. Thanks to open systems, Europe can build solutions in harmony with its values: unity in diversity, openness and inclusiveness, non-discrimination and respect for privacy”.

Open access software at the NCM

What echo are French-speaking Belgian politicians and public authorities giving to this desire for European openness and digital autonomy? The least we can say is that they are moving forward in a scattered fashion, Belgian style, one might be tempted to say. Back to basics. In the 2019 parliamentary elections, what role will digital autonomy play in the party manifestos? For the MR and Défi parties, the answer is unequivocal: no reference to free software, simply a reference, on the MR side, to the desire to develop “open access software”, to regulate this development and to favour free solutions. The main sector targeted: education, an area where, as we know, Microsoft is at the helm of the flagship, with Google on the bridge and Zoom in the hold. The PS says it would like to see “the use of free software in government departments, as well as the pooling of acquisitions of new technologies in order to achieve economies of scale”.

A strategic vision of digital for the cdH

The position of the cdH is more marked and ambitious. At the beginning of January 2019, Vanessa Matz brought the Gafam tax project to the House, but it was rejected by the Finance Committee (N-VA and Open VLD voted against, MR and CD&V abstained). The Liège MP listed the measures included in her party’s programme. These include “making free and open source software available to students, encouraging the promotion of free logic, including within public administrations and organisations of public interest or providing public services, supporting the development and dissemination of free software, which makes an effective contribution to reducing the digital divide and combating computer piracy. It can also be used free of charge,” adds Vanessa Matz, “which is very important in education and for jobseekers, for example. They also encourage sharing and innovation in the digital field. The general public should be better informed of the existence of these tools, as well as the correspondences with the corresponding proprietary tools”.

At the PTB, a cultural and political dimension

The PTB also places great emphasis on free software as a tool for appropriating digital culture and as a political instrument for digital sovereignty. To meet the first objective, encouraging access to digital culture, the PTB is proposing to encourage the use of free software, by promoting creative commons licences, creating an online public library and media library and setting up a central digital application for access to cultural works. The second involves working towards digital autonomy. “Faced with the Web giants, we will make the use of data subject to the obligation to work according to the principles of open source, open architecture, open standards and open data. To free ourselves from the stranglehold of the big technology multinationals, we are extending the use of computer operating systems and free software in public services. We want public authorities to adopt open source software in all their activities. This will guarantee their independence from large international technology companies. The new programmes of public services (administration, but also public companies such as the SNCB) will also be created in open source”.

Ecolo: for equal and fair access to digital technology

Ecolo, the only party that has decided to make open source the standard for its internal digital operations, is also developing a political vision of open source. “Every ICT user must be protected and free in his or her choice of hardware and software,” stresses Simon Rasquin, Ecolo policy adviser. “In this context, Ecolo is defending free software because the issue goes far beyond computer hardware: defending free software means defending a social project that echoes the social and environmental changes that ecologists have always supported. The aim of the movement is to combat the appropriation of information, knowledge and technological developments by the few, thereby preventing equal and fair access to IT and technological innovations, which is the driving force behind the digital economy”. For Ecolo, “open source software also embodies fundamental social values, since it promotes emancipation, creation and collaboration in the face of the competitive and closed model of proprietary software. “In concrete terms, the Green Party is proposing to systematise the use of open source software in the public sector: public authorities, administrations and schools.

The Walloon governments of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation make a commitment (on paper)

So much for everyone’s positions. A summary can be found in the 2019-2024 policy statements of the Walloon governments and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. The aim is to “promote and use, as far as possible, open standards and free software in public administrations, public interest bodies and ministerial offices”. It also aims to “promote the use of open source software in schools and strengthen initial and in-service training for teachers in this area”. Last but not least, the government intends to “promote the use of open source software among citizens and businesses, in particular through awareness-raising and/or training initiatives, and develop open source software training for professional use”.

Where is the roadmap?

There is a will, there is a framework. Then there’s reality, and here we have to say that we’re looking for the roadmap. In its written declaration, the government indicates its firm intention not only to defend but to promote the use of open source in the key sectors of administration and education. Faced with the crisis at Covid, which forced the latter to work remotely with students, how did the politicians act? Linda Doria, a teacher and media education officer at the ASBL Centre Audiovisuel de Liège, takes a look back in an article on digital technology in schools available on the CAV website. Questioned by one of her free network teaching colleagues about the adoption of the ‘Rentrée numérique’ project run by the ASBL EducIT in her school, she felt it was important to look at this type of new digital teaching tool. Along with the ASBL Educode’s Relie project, this was the only structured project offered to the teaching staff. Everything else has amounted to declarations of intent and an invitation to muddle through.

Google in the schoolbag

“Faced with what was felt to be an urgent need to monitor pupils’ learning using digital tools at all costs during the lockdown, the POs, school principals and teachers put in place various solutions. To compensate for the lack of resources and tools offered by the education administration in FWB, as well as the difficulty of mastering these tools, solutions that were easy to use and access were used most of the time. Teachers have used tools such as Gsuite (Google’s suite of applications for collaborative working and online production), Teams (Microsoft’s collaborative platform for video conferencing, among other things) and private messaging services such as Messenger and WhatsApp from Facebook. At the same time, the EducIT association has launched its ‘Digital Back-to-School’ project, which it presented to the taskforce set up by ministers Pierre-Yves Jeholet, Caroline Desire and Frédéric Daerden: “The idea is to offer each school the possibility of using the Internet for the first time. The idea is to offer each pupil a Chromebook, a computer running Google’s OS, for €60 a year for 3 years, plus a balance of €30. On its website, a teaching kit is available for teachers. It includes a connection and synchronisation tool (Google Chrome), a virtual classroom (Google Classroom), a storage space (Google Drive) and a video conferencing facility (Google Meet). Welcome to the Google Friends community…

Forced to buy from the owner?

Linda Doria asks: “Using tools from GAFAM at school, as is the case with the Chromebook, inevitably raises the question of consent. Will pupils or teachers (if the school signs a leasing contract to use software or hardware from GAFAM, for example) be obliged to consent to the use of these tools? On the other hand, the collection and processing of data centralised at Google could well infringe the privacy of pupils and teachers. Even if the company undertakes, through the G Suite for Education accounts, not to use the data collected for advertising purposes and not to resell this data to third parties, the company does in fact collect the data.

A critical stance on the use of digital technology and tools in schools

The teacher also regrets the lack, or even absence, of critical questioning of these tools. “Politicians, the media, schools and the general public believe that it is vital to educate young people (and the not-so-young) about the media. This is particularly true of issues that are very much in vogue these days, such as fake news, social networking, cyber-bullying and screen addiction. There is an urgent need to broaden the representations of the fields of action of media education. The choice of a computer, its operating system, software and online services are all issues that schools, through media education, need to consider”.

White Card – Carte blanche

The white card for “education under an open licence and for responsible, critical and civic education” signed on 7 July by some sixty people from the worlds of education, politics and associations is along the same lines: “Faced with the rise of widespread digital surveillance, keeping control of our data and our tools is a major challenge. Free and open source software is the only answer, and is a necessary but not sufficient condition for regaining this control. Free software has no restrictions on use. You can understand how it works, adapt it without limit and share it again. GAFAM have made no mistake about it: their global infrastructure relies entirely on open source software. Open Source software runs the entire Internet infrastructure, including our smartphones. This proves that open source software is a foundation on which to create local, high value-added jobs that are difficult to relocate. In France, open source software services account for 10% of the IT market, with annual growth of 9%, and represent 60,000 jobs. What’s more, open source software, like openly licensed content such as Wikipedia, is one of the biggest collective knowledge creation projects. In this way, they highlight the notion of the common good and enable the emancipation of each individual, in line with the mission of education, which is to train responsible and aware citizens.

Thinking about digital tools

Education is going to make increasing use of digital educational content: free software makes it easier to share and reuse content. The Walloon government and the government of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation have clearly understood this, as stated in their 2019-2024 policy statement. We, teachers, parents and citizens, remain attentive to the necessary ethical and global reflection that must now precede choices concerning digital tools for schools, and we call on them to “ask questions outside the box. We would like to see the government’s commitments implemented as widely and as quickly as possible, and we would like to know what progress has been made one year after the promises made in the DPC and DPR. We believe that digital technology should continue to be a tool at the service of human beings, extending the thinking of those who use it, complementing existing resources and not replacing them.”

Not RGPD compliant

By the way, on 7 July this year, the Berlin Data Protection Authority ruled that most videoconferencing services are not compliant with the RGPD. Zoom, Google Meet, Skype and Microsoft Teams do not comply with European legislation on the processing of personal data. Hence the importance of initiatives such as Educode, the Jitsi services set up by the Walloon inter-municipal organisation iMio for local authorities in Wallonia and the CPASs, the Jitsi and BigBlueButton bodies operating on the website of the alternative Brussels host Domaine Public, and the Jitsi service available on the website of the national research and education network Belnet.

Digital must be a public service

We should be able to go further. On the Renater site, the French equivalent of Belnet, the education and research community has access to a complete library of entirely free tools and services. Alongside the ‘Rendez-vous’ videoconferencing space, there is an event organiser (Evento), a large file transfer application (FileSender), an IT project hosting and management space (SourceSup), a work platform for mailing lists (Universalistes) and a collaborative messaging system (Partage). The Wallonia and Brussels regions have launched a popular online consultation to imagine the future of Covid. One of the key proposals, at a time of digital transition, must be the establishment of a genuine digital public service, in line with the declarations of intent of its governments.

Jean-Luc Manise
Director of Digital Transformation at CESEP and freelance journalist