The replacement of Palantir by ChapsVision at France's DGSI is being trumpeted as a triumph of sovereignty, a long-overdue wresting of state secrets from the clutches of American capital. How touching. Here we witness the state performing for itself—choosing one merchant of the security apparatus over another, swapping an American sword for a French one, as though the blade's provenance matters when it cuts. The substance remains unchanged: the datafication of dissent, the algorithmic sorting of populations into degrees of docility and danger. The colour of the flag sewn onto the uniform changes nothing about the uniform's purpose.

What is 'technological sovereignty' but a bourgeois fantasy dressed in patriotic garb? The French state, in its infinite naiveté or calculated cynicism—take your pick—imagines that replacing a foreign corporation with a domestic one breaks the chain of dependence. It does not. It merely relocates the extraction of surplus value, redirects the accumulation of capital, shuffles the beneficiaries of the state's expenditure. Palantir served American accumulation; ChapsVision shall serve French. The machine of surveillance, however, grinds on with the same mechanical indifference to human freedom.

The deeper scandal lies unspoken: that the state itself has become a customer of the surveillance industry, purchasing the tools of its own oppression as though they were neutral instruments rather than crystallised class relations. The intelligence apparatus does not spy abstractly; it monitors workers, migrants, the poor, the discontented—those whose very existence threatens the reproduction of capital. When the French state buys 'French' technology to watch its own population, it is simply ensuring that the profits of control remain within the national circuit of accumulation.

The invocation of 'sovereignty' and 'complexity'—that favourite word of technocrats seeking to mystify their operations—conceals the elementary fact: whether foreign or domestic, the means of surveillance are always means of class domination. We exchange one master for another and call it liberation.