10 guys in Northern VA are making those calls, not the forward deployed engineers and not your infra.
palantir dials home at some point to verify a license, right?
Enterprise software is licensed based on support contracts and audits. "trust" is actually more present because a large company or the government can't just vanish if they're in license compliance breach and can later be sued to recover costs.
This is basically Oracle and IBMs business model: let people install whatever they want, then request a spot check if usage and discover the license breaches which can be rectified by buying more of whatever now that it's business critical.
Then in 2024 the CrowdStrike BSOD screw up happened, and I was surprised to learn that no, not everything is airgapped. Apparently, businesses are okay with untrusted, unvetted, self-updating pieces of code that run in kernel mode.
This + corporate shit policies from departents disconnected from the needs on the terrain.
Indeed, that wasn't a great decision. But... there is a serious lack of alternatives that makes it very hard to get around the United States and Israel when it comes to this kind of software. Of course the Dutch should have rolled their own but give that we can't even get our tax software sorted out (I think they've been at it for 30 years), had our digital notary services hacked and a number of other noteworthy items I think that maybe 'buy' instead of 'build' was the right decision.
It's very tricky, I would definitely not be able to claim that in his shoes I would have done better. As a prime minister he's done a fair job given the absolutely impossible situation in our government right now, and this decision is one of those where at least he's willing to make a stand (unlike many other EU countries).
This level of governing is always going to be an exercise in endless compromises.
Trump isn't trusted by any intelligence service, but seems to only publicly distrust his own ones.