As previously reported, the suspiciously rapid emergence of operating system age verification laws across the United States has jumped from the state level to the federal level, thanks to the disingenuously named Parents Decide Act (HR 8250). The current version of the bill’s text makes a number of things fairly clear regarding its intent and scope. But it also makes a number of sweeping misinformed assumptions about digital technology in general – and seems to be completely oblivious to the possibility that the proposed technology could be reverse-engineered as a means of targeting the same populations of non-adult technology users it purports to protect. It also fundamentally overlooks the fact that digital device operating systems have uses that exceed the scope of home entertainment within the United States.

For example: running the governments of other countries.

The Government of France has announced the creation of Direction interministérielle du numérique (DINUM), an agency with the specific brief of migrating their entire federal workforce desktop office computing inventory from Microsoft Windows to Linux. The announcement makes clear that the principle driver behind this decision is the realization that reliance upon U.S. based technology providers like Microsoft is both a security risk and a liability – one that will only increase as the United States continues to squander its former international credibility under the erratic ‘leadership’ of the current regime.

“The State can no longer simply acknowledge its dependence; it must break free. We must become less reliant on American tools and regain control of our digital destiny. We can no longer accept that our data, our infrastructure, and our strategic decisions depend on solutions whose rules, pricing, evolution, and risks we do not control. The transition is underway: our ministries, our operators, and our industrial partners are now embarking on an unprecedented initiative to map our dependencies and strengthen our digital sovereignty. Digital sovereignty is not optional.”

French Minister of Public Action and Accounts, David Amiel

This initiative, involving some 2.5 million government workstations, is the largest and most ambitious Digital Sovereignty effort by a European governmental entity announced to date, but it is not the first. The odds of its success are not bad: they are starting with an existing Linux distribution, GendBuntu, that has been in use by the French National Police (Gendarmerie nationale) since 2008. In other words, they have a stable pilot program that has been supporting roughly 100,000 users for almost twenty years. They also have lessons learned from previous such initiatives that failed, and the added incentive of Microsoft’s increasing abuses against the digital privacy of their customers.

This raises a very interesting question: let’s just say that the ‘Parents Decide’ passes, and all U.S. based operating system providers find themselves under a legal requirement to provide what effectively amounts to a ‘backdoor’ that sends personally sensitive information to an API managed and maintained by the U.S. Federal Government – at roughly the same time the French Government is in the early phases of migrating away from one of the U.S. based companies, Microsoft, that is already spying on its customers anyway and will be happy to comply with  a requirement to share data they were already planning to harvest anyway.

One obvious impact is that the French Government will be further convinced they’d made the right decision. A less obvious impact is that Ubuntu, the Linux distribution GendBuntu is based on, just happens to be owned by a U.S. based company, Canonical, that will be all too happy to comply as well with this nonsense.

That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker for the French migration. Linux, as I’ve mentioned before, is Open Source software. If Ubuntu starts adding age verification spyware, the maintainers of GendBuntu can strip it out – and since the maintainers of GendBuntu are already cops anyway, there’s not a huge risk they’ll reverse engineer the spyware and sell an app for targeting digitally active U.S. children to bad actors (or maybe there is – to varying degrees, all cops pretty much are bastards). But again, ‘open source software’. Whatever they have to do to get rid of this garbage, the code is available to anyone else who wants it.

Of course, all of this sails right over the heads of the ignorant congress critters sponsoring this nonsense, neither one of whom could be reliably expected to distinguish an operating system from a hole in the ground, both of whom receive a fair amount of campaign contributions ultimately originating from Zionist Tech Bros with fairly suspicious intentions of their own. But the growing international movement toward digital sovereignty and digital privacy probably means that passage of the ‘Parents Decide’ act will only further isolate the U.S. government and U.S. tech companies from a larger world community that is increasingly done with their bullshit.