Pluralistic: The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure (10 Nov 2026)


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Two men in 1960s business-wear peer into the guts of a refrigerator-sized computer cabinet. In the foreground is a huge crowd of 1930s-era people, jostling to get in. Behind the scene is a 1950s airplane on a runway. Floating in the sky are warped, fuzzy EU flag stars.

The EU should go big and hard over border IT failure (permalink)

If the EU has a future as a political project, it will have to be as a living, breathing repudiation of Ronald Reagan's maxim that "The nine most terrifying words are 'I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'"

In other words, the EU's future depends on its ability to publicly perform competence and capacity. The EU is a technocratic project, and the one trait technocrats must show is undeniable technical competence. This is the secret of Zohran Mamdani's administration: being seen in public, constantly fixing things that are broken, and making things that work even better:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

This is a goal that is largely incompatible with charismatic megaprojects, and unfortunately, that's the EU's favorite kind of project: something big and splashy and worthy of the extreme effort required to squeeze anything through the Byzantine EU approvals process:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-planning-system-system

Even more unfortunate is that the EU isn't just a technocratic project, it's a neoliberal technocratic project, so when it does embark on one of these megaprojects, it almost always does so as a "public-private partnership" that sees vast sums transferred to private firms to carry out public works. Since megaprojects are always over-budget and behind schedule, this creates the perfect conditions for absolute banditry, in which private companies overcharge and underdeliver, and before you know it, you're billions poorer and back in Reagan's "most terrifying words" territory.

Here's a perfect example: Schengen is a region of (mostly) EU countries who have opened their borders to one another. Once you've crossed into any of the 29 Schengen countries, you can generally stroll into any of the other Schengen countries without showing a passport or having your bags searched:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schengen_Area

This is an awfully convenient system…once you're inside of Schengen. But the Schengen agreement means that each of the member states is trusting the other states to manage a common border, a task that is made all the more urgent by the fascist international, whose far right parties have whipped millions of otherwise sensible people into a xenophobic frenzy over migration. This has led to a kind of bureaucracy-shifting exercise that removed all the complexity from inter-Schengen borders and concentrated it at the borders between each Schengen country and the rest of the world.

Under this system, every Schengen country must accurately log the passage of every non-Schengen person into and out of the region. If you fly into Rome and out of Helsinki, then both the Italian and Finnish border guards must be cognizant of that fact and correctly log it. To make matters even more complex, visa-free access to Schengen is restricted to 90 days in the entire region out of any given 180-day period. For example, last month I was stranded in Frankfurt overnight thanks to a canceled flight. If I had totaled 90 days out of the previous 180 in Schengen, I would not have been allowed out of the airport's secure area until midnight, when the day ticked over and now my total would be 89 days out of 180 (thankfully, I was able to leave the airport and stay in a crummy airport hotel instead of sleeping on the floor of the airport).

To manage this system, the EU commissioned several giant IT companies to build a networked, biometric border-crossing system. Under the spec, the system would track those 90-day windows for everyone who passed in and out of Schengen, using fast fingerprint/facial scans to move people swiftly through any border crossing in the 29 Schengen countries.

It is a gross understatement to call this system behind schedule and overbudget. The Entry Exit System (EES) was supposed to roll out in 2022, but it didn't go live until October 2025 – whereupon it completely, catastrophically failed, despite having doubled its budget:

https://www.theregister.com/security/2025/09/25/eu-to-register-fingerprints-faces-for-short-stay-visitors/1141501

It's been more than a year since EES went live and it is still an absolute disaster. Travelers arriving or leaving Schengen are frequently hit with multi-hour delays. Numerous flights have been canceled, and airlines who fly without waiting for passengers in the immobile, snaking lines must rebook those passengers and endure their wrath. At major airports, it's routine for border guards to simply suspend their use of the EES system, waving through passengers without registering them in the system:

https://eesqueue.com/

EES is a disaster for aviation operations and border crossings. Any true reckoning with its costs wouldn't stop at the hundreds of millions of euros paid to private sector partners, but also the hundreds of millions more in costs borne by travelers and airlines, to say nothing of the opportunity costs paid by travelers who made it through the checkpoints through the brute-force expedient of leaving hours of extra time for a broken border formality.

Which means that the disaster isn't merely a logistics crisis, it's also a credibility and legitimacy crisis. A year (and counting) of headlines about this dismal failure of an IT system have further eroded public confidence in the EU's technical capabilities. How can the EU claim to be a sound technocratic steward of the vast administrative challenges facing a 27-state transnational entity when it can't make the computers work, and when those failures produce the very visible phenomenon of gigantic queues of fuming passengers?

(Not just fuming, either: when I was stuck in Frankfurt last month, there were at least half a dozen travelers who were loudly sobbing as they realized they were going to miss their flights home.)

The contractors for this nonfunctional, grossly overbudget, years-late project (IBM, Atos, and Leonardo) are now being sued, but – incredibly – the EU kept the lawsuit a secret. The only reason we know that IBM, Atos, and Leonardo are facing the EU in court is that the FT spotted an inconspicuous note in the annual financial statements for eu-LISA (the European Union Agency for the Operational Management of Large-Scale IT Systems in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice):

https://www.eulisa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/fy2025_eu-lisa_faa.pdf

The secrecy of this lawsuit is another mark against the EU's technical competence. Any administrative system that relies on private-sector outsourcing to carry out its essential projects must have a core competency in overseeing those private partners, which includes loudly and mercilessly punishing those partners when they fail.

By keeping the suit secret, the eu-LISA telegraphs that the fault lies with the EU, not with IBM, Atos, and Leonardo, who racked up hundreds of millions in fees and delivered a very broken, very late system that ruined the days (and voyages) of millions of travelers:

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/11/10/eus-212m-border-it-project-lands-ibm-and-atos-in-legal-water/5308669

Anyone who's ever watched a large IT consultancy firm run one of these large projects knows that this kind of bungling and gouging is par for the course. The old adage that "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" does not mean that IBM can deliver a functional IT system; it means that when IBM fucks up your project, you can escape any blame because they're the gold standard for fucking up.

Every time the EU lets these companies off the hook without a big, splashy public reckoning, they reinforce Reagan's "most terrifying words" maxim. As Voltaire wrote, "Sometimes you must execute an admiral to encourage the others." The EU should be dragging these IT bandits in public, every day, naming the top executives who oversaw the project.

They should do this every time there's a problem with a private contractor, but EES is especially ripe for this kind of treatment. That's because EES whacked a ton of rich, powerful people. Those are the sort of people who might otherwise run cover for giant, bungling, wildly profitable IT consulting firms, but who are also the most reliably pissy, vindictive dickheads about anything that affects them personally. These are the sorts of people you definitely want inside your tent, pissing out – but in hiding its lawsuit under a bushel, the EU has invited them to stand outside its tent and piss in.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

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#15yrsago Understanding McDonald’s as a commodities broker with a restaurant sideline: the McRib https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage/

#15yrsago Why we get the future of tech wrong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUXh-GPa5dI

#15yrsago Fake British WWII passport for Hitler https://web.archive.org/web/20120608185357/https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=46

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#10yrsago Trump Administration: a climate denier for the EPA, a Goldman-Sachs banker for Treasury https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/who-is-in-president-trump-cabinet-231071

#10yrsago How science fiction can help us survive Trump’s America https://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/the_prospect_be/

#10yrsago Clinton’s data-driven “ground game” sucked in exactly the same way “targeted ads” suck, for the same reason https://web.archive.org/web/20161111084125/http://tomewing.tumblr.com/post/152963356681/polls-etc

#10yrsago The first transgender suicide hotline: 877-565-8860 https://translifeline.org/

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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Recent appearances (permalink)


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Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 526 (34498 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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