Nominally, CALEA backdoors are under US control, but the reality is that *lots* of hackers exploit CALEA to attack governments and corporations, inside the US and abroad. Remember Salt Typhoon, the worst-ever hacking attack on US government agencies and large corporations? The Salt Typhoon hackers used CALEA as their entry point into those networks:

pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/for…

US monopolists - within Trump's coercive reach - control so many of the world's critical systems.

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Take John Deere, the ag-tech monopolist that supplies the majority of the world's tractors. By design, those tractors do not allow the farmers who own them to alter their software. That's so John Deere can force farmers to use Deere's own technicians for repairs, and so that Deere can extract soil data from farmers' tractors to sell into the global futures market.

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A tractor is a networked computer in a fancy, expensive case filled with whirling blades, and at any time, Deere can reach into any tractor and permanently immobilize it. Remember when Russian looters stole those Ukrainian tractors and took them to Chechnya, only to have Deere remotely brick their loot, turning the tractors into multi-ton paperweights?

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Many of us cheered the high-tech comeuppance, but when you consider that Trump could order Deere to do this to *all* tractors, on his whim, this gets a lot more sinister:

pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/abo…

Any government thinking about the future of geopolitics in an era of Trump's mad king fascism should be thinking about how to flash those tractors - and phones, and games consoles, and medical implants, and ventilators - with free and open software that is under its owner's control.

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The problem is that every country in the world has signed up to America's ban on jailbreaking.

In the EU, it's Article 6 of the Copyright Directive. In Mexico, it's the IP chapter of the USMCA. If Central America, it's via CAFTA. In Australia, it's the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.

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In Canada, it's 2012's Bill C-11, which bans Canadian farmers from fixing their own tractors, Canadian drivers from taking their cars to a mechanic of their choosing, and Canadian iPhone and games console owners from choosing to buy their software from a Canadian store:

pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/bea…

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These anti-jailbreaking laws were designed as a tool of economic extraction, a way to protect American tech companies' sky-high fees and rampant privacy invasions by making it illegal, everywhere, for anyone to alter how these devices work without the manufacturer's permission.

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But today, these laws have created clusters of deep-seated infrastructural vulnerabilities that reach into all our digital devices and services, including the digital devices that harvest our crops, supply oxygen to our lungs, or tell us when Trump's masked shock-troops are hunting people in our vicinity.

It's well past time for a post-American internet. Every device and every service should be designed so that the people who use them have the final say over how they work.

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Manufacturers' back doors and digital locks that prevent us from updating our devices with software of our choosing were never a good idea. Today, they're a catastrophe.

The world signed up to these laws because the US threatened them with tariffs if they didn't do as they were told. Well, happy Liberation Day, everyone. The US told the world to pass America's tech laws or face American tariffs.

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When someone threatens to burn down your house unless you do as you're told, *and then they burn your house down anyway*, you don't have to keep doing what they told you.

When Putin invaded Ukraine, he inadvertently pushed the EU to accelerate its solarization efforts, to escape their reliance on Russian gas, and now Europe is a decade ahead of schedule in meeting its zero-emissions goals:

electrek.co/2025/09/30/solar-l…

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Solar leads EU electricity generation as renewables hit 54%

In Q2 2025, renewables powered 54% of EU electricity, with solar leading the mix and topping all sources in June for the first time.

^{Michelle Lewis (Electrek)}

Today, another mad dictator is threatening the world's infrastructure. For the rest of the world to escape dictators' demands, they will have to accelerate their independence from American tech - not just Russian gas. A post-American internet starts with abandoning the laws that give US companies - and therefore Trump - a veto over how your technology works.

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I'm on a tour with my new book *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #SanFrancisco, #Portland and #Seattle!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

eof/