Papers, Please: Who Does Your Browser Engine Actually Belong To? (opens in new tab)

Every German who renews a passport, files taxes through ELSTER, fights for a Bürgeramt appointment, or signs into a statutory health insurer does all of it inside a rendering engine they do not control, cannot audit, and that rewrites itself overnight from a server on the American west coast. The browser engine is the most widely deployed piece of foreign software in the whole of German public life. And I don’t see it on a single critical-infrastructure list.