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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 surve

• 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