Technology & Cyber Security Leader · Founder of AltLibre
I’ve spent thirty years in technology: UK central government, higher education, and international development in some of the world’s most fragile states. These days I make one argument more than any other. Where your data sits matters far less than whose laws it answers to.
I’ve worked in and around technology for over thirty years, in places that don’t usually turn up on the same CV: Whitehall, universities, and aid programmes in fragile and conflict-affected states across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The same question followed me through all of them. Not whether we could build the thing, but who would control it once we had.
AltLibre is my attempt at an answer. I started it to help British and European organisations see a dependency most had never priced: data held by a US company answers to US law, wherever the servers happen to sit. Some of that work is practical, swapping Microsoft, Google and SAP for open-source and European tools that are GDPR-compliant by default. Some of it is duller and matters more: working out which of your data actually needs protecting, and knowing how you’d leave a supplier before the day you have to.
I write here, and post most days on LinkedIn and Bluesky, about digital sovereignty, cyber security in the aid sector, AI and where its ethics give way, and the risks technology dependency carries in poorer countries. I work from Cornwall, which turns out to be a good place to think about this. The cables, the wind farms, the new data centre and the question of who owns it keep the sovereignty argument from ever staying abstract.
Using AI without handing over your judgement.
Read articles →Keeping data and people safe, especially where the stakes run high.
Read articles →GDPR in practice, and why your personal data is not your employer's asset.
Read articles →Where your data sits, and who it actually answers to.
Read articles →Cost, lock-in, and the long game of what you choose to depend on.
Read articles →Staying out of the way of people who are good at their jobs.
Read articles →
AI & Ethics
The infrastructure argument for digital sovereignty is over. The next front is the AI layer, and it is hardening faster than the cloud ever did. When the vendor that could not guarantee French data to the French Senate becomes the loudest seller of sovereignty, buying the label is not progress. It is the opposite.
Digital Sovereignty
Europe largest industrial company is migrating its most critical systems off AWS and onto a French provider, explicitly to keep them beyond the reach of foreign extraterritorial law. Read the detail and a playbook appears: classify by consequence, procure on jurisdiction, keep your options, move the tier that matters.
AI & Ethics
Every AI policy now leans on one sentence: a human reviews the output. In practice that often means a person glances at something plausible and clicks approve. That is ceremony, not review. Real review has to be designed, and the methods auditors have trusted for a century transfer directly.
If you want to know where your organisation really answers to, and what changing it would take, get in touch. If you’d rather start with the numbers, the calculator is a fair first look.