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The last time I looked into it, all SilentCircle had was a small sales office in the French part. No engineering, marketing, etc... just a secretary and a sales
by comrade1 11y ago
The last time I looked into it, all SilentCircle had was a small sales office in the French part. No engineering, marketing, etc... just a secretary and a sales guy.
I'd be surprised if they move anything substantial besides their servers to Switzerland. It's increasingly difficult for non-europeans to get residence permits here. I doubt Phil, Jon Callas, etc are anywhere near Switzerland, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
As for Switzerland being a 'privacy snakeoil', that's wrong. Privacy rules (especially financial) are strict and followed by the government, unlike in the u.s. There are definitely surveillance operations, for example, the satellite communication program that uncovered the CIA rendition programs, but these are mostly directly outward.
- zmanian 11y agoUnless your policy is that your executives can be arrested, your assets seized and your investors pressured and still you will resist, operating out of a privacy friendly jurisdiction offers no reasonable protections to your users. Now you can do some clever stuff like setup your software update mechanisms so that updates require a signature from a independently minded individual in a privacy friendly jurisdiction that might offer more effective user protections.
- JshWright 11y agoPhil spends almost all his time in Geneva at this point (obviously excepting travel for conferences, etc).
- comrade1 11y agoThat's great. However, it still looks like it's just a sales office based on sc's job board. I'd be curious to know if he got residency but I know you probably can't answer that. Without residency he can only spend 90 days in ch every 6 months.
- JshWright 11y agoI don't know about his official residency status. I do know that he spends enough time on the road for conferences, etc, that it is possible that half of every 6 months works for him... As far as who is in the office there... Any office we have is a sales office. All of our tech/engineering folks are remote, and spread all around the world.