8 ms·

Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

158 points by benevol 10y ago

sebiw 10y ago
A sad day in the history of Switzerland. Especially in times of Snowden and mass surveillance revelations.
benevol 10y ago
As a reminder, Switzerland has its own surveillance scandal in its past, the so-called "Fichenskandal" [0] during which almost 1 million people were under surveillance (out of approximately 7 million), between 1900 and 1990. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichenskandal https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichenskandal (german language)
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "lmost 1 million people were under surveillance (out of approximately 7 million), between 1900 and 1990." It's probably all of them now -- if not by their own government, then by the US spy agencies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the various cell phone providers, credit card providers, stores, cameras, etc. It's very hard not to be under surveillance these days, unless you're willing to completely unplug, move to a remote area, and become self-sufficient.
  - snewk 10y ago
    > move to a remote area, and become self-sufficient this behavior may even be considered 'radical' enough to warrant more direct surveillance.
    - mk89 10y ago
      Absolutely! Ahah. And even your friends/neighbors, if asked for information about you by some authorities, would say: not sure, they were always nice people, then one day they decided to leave the city; maybe they got brainwashed by one of those crazy guys you know, nowadays you hear a lot about them. Did they do something bad? :)
  - gscott 10y ago
    Samaritan is a great system anyone who says otherwise....
- kakoni 10y ago
  Heres the English wikipedia link, "Secret files scandal" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal
- andreasley 10y ago
  Documents were collected for up to 700 000 people (about 10% of the population), but saying they were "under surveillance" is stretching it. Basically everyone who was politically "left" was considered a potential threat and random snippets of information about them were collected – sometimes absurdly trivial stuff and quite a lot of it wrong. In 1994, a digital equivalent was born: A database called "ISIS". In 2010, a review showed that more than 230 000 people and organizations were registered once again. NDB, the federal intelligence service, collected data without checking if it is relevant. After a mandatory cleanup, this database is now said to only contain about 30 000 entities. The outcry was much smaller that time. Now, my fellow citizens voted to be properly surveilled. And this time, we'll do it right and probably collect everything, including looking at any traffic flowing through Switzerland. That will be easy, since a recently passed law called "BÜPF" forces every swiss provider to retain metadata for six months, make realtime surveillance possible, decrypt data if they helped encrypt it and pay themselves for the necessary surveillance equipment (they will be reimbursed for every surveillance case). I voted against it, but the writing was on the wall. Well-propagated irrational fear beats common sense. Maybe the checks and balances will be properly implemented this time, but I'm not counting on it.
  - l33tbro 10y ago
    Thanks for this. My own ignorance had me thinking Switzerland to generally be a more educated and progressive nation than it's neighbouring countries. By educated, I mean thinking more critically about issues like surveillance, terrorism, and immigration. Guessing the "well-propogated irrational fear" comes from mainstream media and politicians? Also, having an old surveillance database named ISIS definitely got a chuckle from me.
    - cJ0th 10y ago
      > Also, having an old surveillance database named ISIS definitely got a chuckle from me. I think this one is worse: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUxdvzDWoAARh_y.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUxdvzDWoAARh_y.jpg
      - 10y ago
benevol 10y ago
It's Fear-of-Terror-Makes-People-Stupid time [0] all over again. Two thirds of the population approve this. [0] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...
- raverbashing 10y ago
  While exaggerated responses are not good, ignoring it is not beneficial and will only result in more extreme responses later on.
- folli 10y ago
  I've voted on the issue, and after some to-and-fro I decided to say yes. I'm not sure how much of a factor the fear of terror was in the overall voting population, but for me personally it didn't play a big role. A short rundown on why I decided to vote yes: -it's typical Swiss compromise: the added competences are comparatively small (especially compared to the competences of neighboring countries) and a judge needs to approve any actions beforehand. The Swiss judicial system is perceived to work generally quite well and is fair. -other organizations which are not democratically legitimized (Big corps, such as Google, Apple and foreign intelligence agencies: US, Germany) have much bigger capabilities to perform any such actions in Switzerland than the Swiss government. I'm not really comfortable with Switzerland being a blind spot for its own law enforcement. -And I think one of the biggest factors: trust in the government: the political system in Switzerland gives the citizen much more power in terms of checks and balances. The "divide" between government, political elite and the people is one of the smallest compared to other European countries. This generally prevents or prohibits any too extreme forms and consequences of any passed laws.
  - saiya-jin 10y ago
    thank you for being honest about your opinion and vote. i am not a citizen albeit living here, but I would agree with you - if strictly following the current laws (and if anywhere, I would expect Swiss would do it), government/secret service is basically toothless, and could not gather anything not publicly known (ie you can't google it, you can't gather it). Not that I am a big fan of intelligence guys, but they are some sort of necessary evil when running a country, if there are still checks and proper oversight in place. And till now it felt like they are way too restricted to actually do their job. Maybe in 20 years we will curse this vote, who knows
rasur 10y ago
I think it really boils down to not enough people understanding the issues and the problems. I had seen (once or twice) people out on the streets campaigning against it to raise awareness on the weekends, but honestly, it was not enough. Only the hard-core techies understood (or appeared to understand) the issue - at least around the area of Zürich where I work I can't think of anyone who thought it was a good idea. Not pleased.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  Is the article wrong on the requirement of a judge's order for collecting information? As far as I understand they will gather the info nonetheless and have a pro forma judge order to "access" it, correct? So what's the difference to the US - other than vastly inferior technical capabilities and the court in question not being secret?
- js8 10y ago
  Please correct me if I wrong, but it seems to me from the description in the OP that this is nothing compared to mass surveillance in other countries. Notably, it requires a court authorization to put somebody under surveillance, which is something that even Snowden would approve if I recall correctly.
  - ekianjo 10y ago
    Yup, this was also my understanding. Nothing like what the NSA or other agencies would do.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    Isn't that what surveillance started as in the U.S.? Give 'em an inch...
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    They would be allowed to intercept any kind of traffic without any court authorization as long as at least one source is coming from a foreign country. Which will be technically true for nearly all IP based communication in Switzerland.
kyledrake 10y ago
From the article, it sounds like it is only allowed for specific individuals/organizations and requires approval from multiple people and a due process warrant. Not exactly the NSA-style illegal warrantless dragnet going on elsewhere.
- noxin 10y ago
  It also allows scanning all the border-crossing internet traffic. Which is an NSA-style dragnet since there is mostly international traffic in a small country.
akhatri_aus 10y ago
I imagine one of the differences in context is Swiss Citizens don't have an outright distrust of their government, relatively speaking.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
BafS 10y ago
For information, all "cantons" (26) approved this vote. You can see the details here: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/20160925/legge-federale-sulle-attivita-informative.html https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/201609...
riotdash 10y ago
It's the only reasonable thing to do. The geeks and techies endlessly complain about privacy issues etc. when it comes to government boosting up security, but still no one has seen nor there is any concrete problems with that. Terrorism on the other hand is killing innocent people all the time everywhere so people giving government these right is a no brainer.
mtgx 10y ago
The era of "Swiss privacy" is now officially over. Germany seems to be the last remaining beacon of hope (mainly thanks to its Constitution, its Courts, and a slightly higher privacy vigilance from the German population, not because its government is any better than the rest).
- bogomipz 10y ago
  Can you elaborate, what aside from bank accounts what else was part of the era of "Swiss privacy."
- nickik 10y ago
  Lol. You can bet your ass that the BND is far more active then anything the Swiss do. They regularly work with forign agencies and do exchanges. They sit right at the largest network hub in europe. There is also little democratic insight into the BND, as the public is excluded from all hearings.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    What is the BND?
    - myrion 10y ago
      BundesNachrichtenDienst - the German secret service. Has been spying for the US for a while now and lied to the parliament about it.
- confounded 10y ago
  Iceland may be a better bet.
- andreasley 10y ago
  DE-CIX, the world's largest internet exchange point, has had a (forced) cooperation with BND, the german federal intelligence service, for several years. The BND also cooperates with the NSA every once in a while. Digital privacy is over everywhere.
Animats 10y ago
We need better handling of surveillance after the fact. Now that everyone knows that massive surveillance is going on, that's no longer a secret. So most surveillance requests should be be released. How about declassifying 75% of surveillance requests after 3 years? The Government gets to pick the 25% that stay secret. That provides lots of info about who's listening to what, but narrowly targeted ones can be kept secret. Then, every 3 years, release 75% of the remainder. After a decade or so, only the really important ones are still secret. This would make it clear who's spending time listening to what, without disrupting investigations. A Federal judge just released 200 surveillance requests.[1] They're from 2012, and even prosecutors didn't claim they still needed to be kept from the public. Maybe the time for this has come. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/meet-the-judge-who-just-released-200-secret-government-surveillance-requests/2016/09/23/4ddb1266-7b50-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/meet-the-...
- FreeFull 10y ago
  Wouldn't this encourage the government to increase surveillance, so they can always keep all the ones they really care about secret?
bogomipz 10y ago
At least the Swiss citizens have a say in the matter. I don't think the same can be said of the UK or the US.
Voukras 10y ago
There has been no proof that this actually stems terrorism or criminality. Not only is there absolutely no empiric case put forward, but neither has anyone even bothered to explain how it could in theory stop terrorism. The vast majority of terrorists probably don't communicate over plaintext email about how they're totally going to attack this thing, yo.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
da_n 10y ago
> It will allow the Federal Intelligence Service and other agencies to put suspects under electronic surveillance if authorised by a court, the defence ministry and the cabinet. I think the fact it has to be authorised by three bodies is interesting, thought it is still unclear if this would just be a rubber stamp process and/or if these bodies could just approve a dragnet approach if they saw fit. Other countries like the UK want to legally enact dragnet surveillance of all citizens without the need for authorisation, I guess the Swiss needed an olive branch to let them belive there will be oversight of this power.
beedogs 10y ago
As usual, abject fear is used to sell the public on something that crushes individual rights and freedoms.

158 points by benevol 10y ago

sebiw 10y ago

A sad day in the history of Switzerland. Especially in times of Snowden and mass surveillance revelations.

As a reminder, Switzerland has its own surveillance scandal in its past, the so-called "Fichenskandal" [0] during which almost 1 million people were under surveillance (out of approximately 7 million), between 1900 and 1990. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichenskandal https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichenskandal (german language)

pmoriarty 10y ago
"lmost 1 million people were under surveillance (out of approximately 7 million), between 1900 and 1990." It's probably all of them now -- if not by their own government, then by the US spy agencies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, the various cell phone providers, credit card providers, stores, cameras, etc. It's very hard not to be under surveillance these days, unless you're willing to completely unplug, move to a remote area, and become self-sufficient.
- snewk 10y ago
  > move to a remote area, and become self-sufficient this behavior may even be considered 'radical' enough to warrant more direct surveillance.
  - mk89 10y ago
    Absolutely! Ahah. And even your friends/neighbors, if asked for information about you by some authorities, would say: not sure, they were always nice people, then one day they decided to leave the city; maybe they got brainwashed by one of those crazy guys you know, nowadays you hear a lot about them. Did they do something bad? :)
- gscott 10y ago
  Samaritan is a great system anyone who says otherwise....
kakoni 10y ago
Heres the English wikipedia link, "Secret files scandal" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal
andreasley 10y ago
Documents were collected for up to 700 000 people (about 10% of the population), but saying they were "under surveillance" is stretching it. Basically everyone who was politically "left" was considered a potential threat and random snippets of information about them were collected – sometimes absurdly trivial stuff and quite a lot of it wrong. In 1994, a digital equivalent was born: A database called "ISIS". In 2010, a review showed that more than 230 000 people and organizations were registered once again. NDB, the federal intelligence service, collected data without checking if it is relevant. After a mandatory cleanup, this database is now said to only contain about 30 000 entities. The outcry was much smaller that time. Now, my fellow citizens voted to be properly surveilled. And this time, we'll do it right and probably collect everything, including looking at any traffic flowing through Switzerland. That will be easy, since a recently passed law called "BÜPF" forces every swiss provider to retain metadata for six months, make realtime surveillance possible, decrypt data if they helped encrypt it and pay themselves for the necessary surveillance equipment (they will be reimbursed for every surveillance case). I voted against it, but the writing was on the wall. Well-propagated irrational fear beats common sense. Maybe the checks and balances will be properly implemented this time, but I'm not counting on it.
- l33tbro 10y ago
  Thanks for this. My own ignorance had me thinking Switzerland to generally be a more educated and progressive nation than it's neighbouring countries. By educated, I mean thinking more critically about issues like surveillance, terrorism, and immigration. Guessing the "well-propogated irrational fear" comes from mainstream media and politicians? Also, having an old surveillance database named ISIS definitely got a chuckle from me.
  - cJ0th 10y ago
    > Also, having an old surveillance database named ISIS definitely got a chuckle from me. I think this one is worse: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUxdvzDWoAARh_y.jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUxdvzDWoAARh_y.jpg
    - 10y ago

benevol 10y ago

It's Fear-of-Terror-Makes-People-Stupid time [0] all over again. Two thirds of the population approve this. [0] http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-people-stupid.html http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/06/fear-of-terror-makes-...

raverbashing 10y ago
While exaggerated responses are not good, ignoring it is not beneficial and will only result in more extreme responses later on.
folli 10y ago
I've voted on the issue, and after some to-and-fro I decided to say yes. I'm not sure how much of a factor the fear of terror was in the overall voting population, but for me personally it didn't play a big role. A short rundown on why I decided to vote yes: -it's typical Swiss compromise: the added competences are comparatively small (especially compared to the competences of neighboring countries) and a judge needs to approve any actions beforehand. The Swiss judicial system is perceived to work generally quite well and is fair. -other organizations which are not democratically legitimized (Big corps, such as Google, Apple and foreign intelligence agencies: US, Germany) have much bigger capabilities to perform any such actions in Switzerland than the Swiss government. I'm not really comfortable with Switzerland being a blind spot for its own law enforcement. -And I think one of the biggest factors: trust in the government: the political system in Switzerland gives the citizen much more power in terms of checks and balances. The "divide" between government, political elite and the people is one of the smallest compared to other European countries. This generally prevents or prohibits any too extreme forms and consequences of any passed laws.
- saiya-jin 10y ago
  thank you for being honest about your opinion and vote. i am not a citizen albeit living here, but I would agree with you - if strictly following the current laws (and if anywhere, I would expect Swiss would do it), government/secret service is basically toothless, and could not gather anything not publicly known (ie you can't google it, you can't gather it). Not that I am a big fan of intelligence guys, but they are some sort of necessary evil when running a country, if there are still checks and proper oversight in place. And till now it felt like they are way too restricted to actually do their job. Maybe in 20 years we will curse this vote, who knows

rasur 10y ago

I think it really boils down to not enough people understanding the issues and the problems. I had seen (once or twice) people out on the streets campaigning against it to raise awareness on the weekends, but honestly, it was not enough. Only the hard-core techies understood (or appeared to understand) the issue - at least around the area of Zürich where I work I can't think of anyone who thought it was a good idea. Not pleased.

m_mueller 10y ago
Is the article wrong on the requirement of a judge's order for collecting information? As far as I understand they will gather the info nonetheless and have a pro forma judge order to "access" it, correct? So what's the difference to the US - other than vastly inferior technical capabilities and the court in question not being secret?
js8 10y ago
Please correct me if I wrong, but it seems to me from the description in the OP that this is nothing compared to mass surveillance in other countries. Notably, it requires a court authorization to put somebody under surveillance, which is something that even Snowden would approve if I recall correctly.
- ekianjo 10y ago
  Yup, this was also my understanding. Nothing like what the NSA or other agencies would do.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Isn't that what surveillance started as in the U.S.? Give 'em an inch...
- tobltobs 10y ago
  They would be allowed to intercept any kind of traffic without any court authorization as long as at least one source is coming from a foreign country. Which will be technically true for nearly all IP based communication in Switzerland.

kyledrake 10y ago

From the article, it sounds like it is only allowed for specific individuals/organizations and requires approval from multiple people and a due process warrant. Not exactly the NSA-style illegal warrantless dragnet going on elsewhere.

noxin 10y ago
It also allows scanning all the border-crossing internet traffic. Which is an NSA-style dragnet since there is mostly international traffic in a small country.

akhatri_aus 10y ago

I imagine one of the differences in context is Swiss Citizens don't have an outright distrust of their government, relatively speaking.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

BafS 10y ago

For information, all "cantons" (26) approved this vote. You can see the details here: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/20160925/legge-federale-sulle-attivita-informative.html https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/201609...

riotdash 10y ago

It's the only reasonable thing to do. The geeks and techies endlessly complain about privacy issues etc. when it comes to government boosting up security, but still no one has seen nor there is any concrete problems with that. Terrorism on the other hand is killing innocent people all the time everywhere so people giving government these right is a no brainer.

mtgx 10y ago

The era of "Swiss privacy" is now officially over. Germany seems to be the last remaining beacon of hope (mainly thanks to its Constitution, its Courts, and a slightly higher privacy vigilance from the German population, not because its government is any better than the rest).

bogomipz 10y ago
Can you elaborate, what aside from bank accounts what else was part of the era of "Swiss privacy."
nickik 10y ago
Lol. You can bet your ass that the BND is far more active then anything the Swiss do. They regularly work with forign agencies and do exchanges. They sit right at the largest network hub in europe. There is also little democratic insight into the BND, as the public is excluded from all hearings.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  What is the BND?
  - myrion 10y ago
    BundesNachrichtenDienst - the German secret service. Has been spying for the US for a while now and lied to the parliament about it.
confounded 10y ago
Iceland may be a better bet.
andreasley 10y ago
DE-CIX, the world's largest internet exchange point, has had a (forced) cooperation with BND, the german federal intelligence service, for several years. The BND also cooperates with the NSA every once in a while. Digital privacy is over everywhere.

Animats 10y ago

We need better handling of surveillance after the fact. Now that everyone knows that massive surveillance is going on, that's no longer a secret. So most surveillance requests should be be released. How about declassifying 75% of surveillance requests after 3 years? The Government gets to pick the 25% that stay secret. That provides lots of info about who's listening to what, but narrowly targeted ones can be kept secret. Then, every 3 years, release 75% of the remainder. After a decade or so, only the really important ones are still secret. This would make it clear who's spending time listening to what, without disrupting investigations. A Federal judge just released 200 surveillance requests.[1] They're from 2012, and even prosecutors didn't claim they still needed to be kept from the public. Maybe the time for this has come. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/meet-the-judge-who-just-released-200-secret-government-surveillance-requests/2016/09/23/4ddb1266-7b50-11e6-beac-57a4a412e93a_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/meet-the-...

FreeFull 10y ago
Wouldn't this encourage the government to increase surveillance, so they can always keep all the ones they really care about secret?

bogomipz 10y ago

At least the Swiss citizens have a say in the matter. I don't think the same can be said of the UK or the US.

Voukras 10y ago

There has been no proof that this actually stems terrorism or criminality. Not only is there absolutely no empiric case put forward, but neither has anyone even bothered to explain how it could in theory stop terrorism. The vast majority of terrorists probably don't communicate over plaintext email about how they're totally going to attack this thing, yo.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

da_n 10y ago

> It will allow the Federal Intelligence Service and other agencies to put suspects under electronic surveillance if authorised by a court, the defence ministry and the cabinet. I think the fact it has to be authorised by three bodies is interesting, thought it is still unclear if this would just be a rubber stamp process and/or if these bodies could just approve a dragnet approach if they saw fit. Other countries like the UK want to legally enact dragnet surveillance of all citizens without the need for authorisation, I guess the Swiss needed an olive branch to let them belive there will be oversight of this power.

beedogs 10y ago

As usual, abject fear is used to sell the public on something that crushes individual rights and freedoms.