Only a short time ago, the announcement that Australia would host a “Top Secret Cloud” built by Amazon Web Services (AWS) would have passed without controversy. It was presented as a practical step in strengthening intelligence and defence cooperation with our closest ally, the United States. But with America now showing unmistakable signs of democratic decay, the decision to integrate our most sensitive systems into a foreign-controlled network demands urgent scrutiny.
In my earlier analysis of AI, surveillance and control, I argued that convenience was quietly turning into compliance — that systems designed to assist us were beginning to direct us. The “Top Secret Cloud” represents that same pattern at the level of states and alliances. What began as a strategy for interoperability is fast becoming an architecture of dependency.
A new architecture of dependency
In July 2024, the Australian Government announced the creation of the “Top Secret Cloud” — a partnership with Amazon Web Services to “secure and share our nation’s data at speed and scale.” It was hailed as Australia’s largest-ever tech investment and a critical milestone in “deepening collaboration” with the United States.
Behind this bland bureaucratic language lies a radical shift in how national security is organised. The project will effectively relocate Australia’s most sensitive defence and intelligence systems into a privately owned, U.S.-controlled digital infrastructure.
AWS, like all major American cloud providers, operates under the U.S. CLOUD Act — legislation that allows U.S. authorities to compel disclosure of data stored anywhere in the world. There is no exemption for allied governments. This means that once Australian intelligence, military or diplomatic data reside on AWS infrastructure, they are, by design, subject to U.S. jurisdiction.
This is not a theoretical concern. The CLOUD Act was explicitly created to override national barriers and ensure extraterritorial access to data. Sovereignty in such a system rests not on law but on goodwill — and goodwill, in politics, is not a policy.
The chain hidden in the cloud
The “Top Secret Cloud” is more than a storage facility. It is the operational platform for REDSPICE (Resilience – Effects – Defence – SPace – Intelligence – Cyber – Enablers), the $9.9 billion transformation program of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). REDSPICE is intended to make the ASD an AI-driven, cloud-based intelligence agency capable of real-time data fusion, predictive analysis, and cyber operations.
This system will, in turn, connect directly into AUKUS Pillar II, the second stream of the AUKUS partnership, focused on advanced capabilities: artificial intelligence, cyber operations, electronic warfare, quantum technologies and autonomous systems.
These architectures are being developed under the principle of “interoperability” — ensuring that the intelligence and military systems of the U.S., U.K. and Australia can exchange data seamlessly. In practice, however, this means alignment not only of technology but of command structure, identity frameworks and even decision-making processes. Once these systems are integrated, withdrawal is virtually impossible without destroying the entire structure.
Australia’s capacity to act independently — technologically, strategically or even politically — diminishes with every new layer of interconnected code. What is presented as cooperation increasingly looks like dependency.
A moral reversal
For the first time in living memory, Australians must ask whether the very infrastructure designed to secure our democracy could one day compromise it. Within the span of a single year, the U.S. political landscape has darkened dramatically. The weaponisation of justice, the erosion of press freedoms, and the open contempt for democratic norms all signal a slide toward illiberalism.
We are witnessing a country where ideology is beginning to override institutional restraint — precisely the kind of regime we would once have been cautious to share our most sensitive infrastructure with.
We would never dream of hosting a “Top Secret Cloud” operated by China. Yet the moral distance between the two superpowers is narrowing alarmingly fast. Authoritarianism, whether wrapped in nationalism or exceptionalism, remains authoritarianism.
And because this integration is proceeding without any meaningful debate about sovereignty, Australia risks being locked into America’s strategic trajectory — one that could, by design, draw automatically into a future military conflict with China. America’s growing hostility toward China, cast in absolute moral terms, has hardened into a dogmatic worldview that increasingly frames international relations as a struggle between good and evil.
The ideological drift beneath the alliance
However, the most dangerous dimension of this partnership is not military but ideological.
Within the American view, allies are not treated as equals but as extensions — subordinate actors expected to adopt America’s worldview as the condition of partnership. The “shared values” once invoked to describe the Western alliance are becoming narrower, more rigid, and less tolerant of dissent.
For Australia, technological integration with the U.S. means more than shared intelligence systems. It means absorbing the cultural and institutional reflexes of a country that is losing faith in its own liberal principles. The more our infrastructure mirrors America’s, the more our politics and bureaucracy will reflect its illiberal instincts — secrecy, surveillance, and the primacy of control over accountability.
The erosion of transparency at home
Worryingly, we are already seeing these tendencies echoed in Australia’s own domestic governance. The Albanese Government’s proposed Freedom of Information reforms — intended, we are told, to protect against “foreign interference” and “vexatious requests” — will in practice make it harder for citizens, journalists and watchdogs to scrutinise government decisions.
Under the proposed amendments, agencies could refuse anonymous requests, reject any request requiring more than 40 hours of work, and expand exemptions for cabinet documents. The changes, I argue, would add new layers of secrecy at a time when transparency is already in decline.
Recent figures show that full FOI disclosures are falling sharply while refusal rates are rising. The cumulative effect is a government less accountable to the people it serves.
This logic — that secrecy equals safety — mirrors the thinking behind the “Top Secret Cloud.” Both embody a growing belief that democratic oversight is a risk to be managed, rather than a right to be defended. When that mindset takes hold, democracy does not collapse overnight; it slowly recodes itself into compliance.
Silence from Canberra
Despite the profound implications, there has been almost no serious debate in Parliament about the long-term risks of this technological dependence. Both major parties appear paralysed by the logic of loyalty — fearful of alienating the United States, unwilling to admit that the alliance may now carry moral and institutional costs.
Yet a healthy alliance depends on honesty, not obedience. If a partner drifts toward authoritarianism, the proper response of a democracy is not to mirror its behaviour but to maintain distance.
So far, Canberra has chosen silence. In doing so, it reinforces the perception that loyalty to the United States is absolute — even when that loyalty undermines our own democratic integrity.
Reclaiming sovereignty before it disappears
Security and sovereignty are not the same. Security can be shared; sovereignty must be owned. By outsourcing the architecture of our intelligence and defence systems to a foreign corporation bound by foreign law, Australia risks trading independence for assurance.
We need a national conversation about technological sovereignty — about what should, and should not, be embedded within alliance infrastructure. Oversight mechanisms, data firewalls, and domestic control must be treated as non-negotiable. Our goal should be to defend democracy not just from external threats but from the subtle corrosion of dependency.
Australia does not stand alone. Genuine security partnerships are possible with other stable democracies — nations such as those in Europe, Canada, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea — that continue to uphold transparency, rule of law and institutional restraint. Aligning more closely with them would broaden our security base without compromising democratic integrity.
Security without sovereignty is submission. If we continue down the current path, we risk discovering too late that our independence has been traded away — not through invasion or conquest, but through code, convenience, and misplaced trust.
Convenience once made us complacent about surveillance. Security may now make us submissive. If we are not vigilant, the cloud that protects us may one day decide for us.
Paul Budde