Is Technology a Product Project or a Channel for Exercising State Power?

The room is quiet in the way only power can make it quiet.

This scene is a composite, built from patterns that recur when public decisions move into software and then meet judicial review.

Evidence and remedy, designed for replayability under judicial scrutiny

A minister has just come from court. The government lost. Not on a technicality. On legitimacy. The judgment is brutal in its simplicity. The state cannot adequately demonstrate lawful authority, evidentiary integrity, and a credible remedy pathway for decisions produced by the system. The decision is set aside. The headlines will not say evidentiary integrity. They will portray it as government’s system was unlawful, government violated rights, government cannot be trusted with data.

The president asks what every voter will ask.

How did we lose?

The delivery team answers in the language of procurement slides. The platform met the specification. Security passed. Uptime was strong. Integrations worked. Adoption targets were reached. A modernization success story. The court did not care.

When Digital Services Exercise Power

When a digital outcome changes rights or obligations, it is not merely a service interaction. It is a state act carried out through software, and it must be defensible when challenged.

The legal department is blunt. The policy survived scrutiny. The execution did not. The state chose to exercise power through a machine that could not prove who was competent to decide, what rule was applied, what evidence was relied upon, whether the record can be trusted later, and how a person can challenge and correct the outcome.

Someone suggests the obvious escape route. Change the law. The suggestion hangs in the air for exactly one second. The government has already strengthened privacy and rights protections to align with European expectations. Rolling those protections back would signal that the state cannot govern within the standards it has committed to. It would invite backlash and external pressure, and it would turn a technical failure into a legitimacy crisis.

Evidence and Remedy Under Judicial Scrutiny

The president asks the only question that matters now.

So what do we do?

A quiet voice from the legal team answers with the tone of someone used to being ignored until it is too late. The system must be redesigned so that lawful competence and delegation are technically bound to issuance, decision reasoning is traceable, evidence is durable and verifiable, corrections preserve history, and remedy is built into the service. With procurement and implementation, this can take years.

Operational logs answer what happened in production. Courts and auditors ask something else: can the state prove what happened later, without relying on informal explanations or privileged access to vendor systems. Evidentiary integrity is the ability to show that records are complete, consistent, and trustworthy over time, in a form an independent reviewer can evaluate. Remedy is not a complaints inbox. Remedy is a defined pathway to challenge, correct, and receive a reasoned response, linked to the original act and its evidence, with clear ownership and predictable handling.

The Modularity Trap in Government Technology

Delivery-first programs do not emerge from stupidity. They emerge from pressure. Capacity is limited, budgets are political, vendors arrive with persuasive roadmaps, and governments want reusable components instead of bespoke integrations.

Modular toolkits and standards communities can be valuable in that context.

Modularity is not the enemy. The failure mode is modularity that breaks legal meaning and fractures responsibility across component boundaries.

Systems are decomposed into reusable parts, and accountability dissolves along the seams. One component issues, another stores, another evaluates, another logs, another handles disputes, and when a citizen challenges the outcome, each part can truthfully say it did not decide. The state becomes a collection of interfaces. Nobody owns the act. Nobody can defend it. Nobody can repair it without rewriting history.

A governance sequencing heuristic such as the Seven Layer model exists precisely to prevent this, by forcing mandate, competence, evidence, and remedy to be engineered before scale.

What Leaders Must Demand Before Scaling

The strategic move is not to slow everything down. It is to stop pretending that success metrics for product delivery are success metrics for state power.

Not every digital interaction is a state act. Governments should separate informational services from decisions that change rights or obligations, such as benefits determinations, licensing outcomes, immigration status actions, sanctions enforcement, or tax assessments, then apply stronger requirements to the second category.

They should contract for verifiability, requiring that authority attribution, decision trace, evidence integrity, correction semantics, and remedy workflow are demonstrable behaviours in a pilot, not assurances in governance documents and slide decks.

They should scale only what can be defended, making rollout contingent on the ability to replay a contested case end to end: who decided, on what basis, with what evidence, how it can be corrected, and how a challenge is processed.

Because the state can outsource code. It cannot outsource responsibility.