When civilian banks, logistics platforms, and payment processors share physical data center infrastructure with military AI systems, those facilities become legitimate military targets under international humanitarian law - and the civilian services housed inside lose their legal protection.
Carrez calls this 'the survival problem,' and it forms part of his definition of sovereignty - digital, data, AI, and so on. He says, 'A lot of people are just talking about digital sovereignty as like a catchphrase for a bunch of things.'
66% of internet users live where political or social sites are blocked, and 78% are in countries where people have been arrested for online posts. New social media regulations have emerged in dozens of countries in the past year alone.
The attacks forced a reckoning with one of the most consequential design flaws in global digital infrastructure: the concentration of military and civilian data on the same physical servers, in facilities that could become military targets the moment a conflict begins.
"World Cloud Security Day is a useful reminder to recognize how much cloud risk now comes down to everyday access decisions and overlooked misconfigurations," says James Maude, Field CTO at BeyondTrust.
Across the world, governments are redefining data. It is no longer a commercial byproduct, but a strategic resource. One that carries economic weight, political influence, and long-term national consequences. At the center of this shift is what most people never consciously see but continuously produce: their digital DNA.
What I walked through wasn't just an immigration gate. It was a node in a rapidly expanding global infrastructure of digital identity, one being constructed at extraordinary speed, across dozens of countries, by a mix of governments, multilateral organizations, and private technology vendors. The people building it believe they are solving real problems: fraud, statelessness, inefficient public services, financial exclusion.
