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.
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.
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.
> My own ignorance had me thinking Switzerland to generally be a more educated and progressive nation than it's neighbouring countries.
Switzerland is actually much more conservative than its european neighbours. For example, they were the last country to give women the right to vote in Europe.
Women vote being allowed in Switzerland meant that men had to agree for it by at least 50%. Some days, I wonder if many of its neighbors would have had women votes as early as they did if they had such a strict condition.
While the swiss men did vote for it in 1971 and allowed women to vote on a federal basis, the men in the canton (state) of "Appenzell Innerrhoden" voted against it until 1990. Then the federal court stepped in and forced them to allow women to vote, too. "Appenzell Innerrhoden" has about 16 000 citizens.
Switzerland is small but diverse. The states have significant freedom in making their laws. This usually works well, but sometimes leads to situations like this.
ISIS was also the name of a secure IT governmental network in France :-)
Note that from a US point of view, there is also a fundamental difference in Switzerland: most citizens there trust that the government can be stopped by a simple popular initiative if it oversteps its bounds. In Switzerland, a petition with enough signatures triggers an official referendum, that if accepted becomes a law. No veto possible by government officials.
So yes, I am too very suspicious of governmental surveillance, but in Switzerland it may be less out of fear and more because they are pretty confident they can stop a government that goes over the top
"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.
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?
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.
It probably boils down to your trust in people. Given many discussions with many people on many topics I tend to stay on the opposite side. Most peoples understanding is about as deep as the most popular news magazines headline, which is not enough for me to consider that they "understood fine, they just disagree" - they understood fine what they've bothered to inform themselves about. So, basically nothing.
>Most peoples understanding is about as deep as the most popular news magazines headline
exactly!which is why, however you put it, with parliaments or with referendums, or with any other kind of "democratic" tool, the basis of democracy is information. When people/media have advantages in something, they will be biased, making democracy actually an oligarchy. If I was Swiss, I would try to understand who is selling me this information. Who is behind this wanted "misinformation"? Most of the time it boils down to people having interests in certain companies. Can it be that, let's say, that most newspapers are "getting convinced" by authorities? Just saying, of course.
They had a public debate, as is the tradition before every referendum, and the assertions and assumptions being presented by both the head of the secret service and the politicians backing it up were incorrect. Technical assumptions were incorrect. The technical capability was misrepresented.
One of the main arguments for this initiative was that the secret service would only be allowed to look at the packet traffic of the affected target, but the reality is that in order to capture just that traffic, all packets are captured and filtered out first; also, there is no technology in existence to prevent the secret service to packet capturing everything.
This, however, was never stated or addressed in the public debate.
Also asserted was that the secret service has and will have good oversight of all activities. The committee consists of only five people. And these people are all politicians currently in the government. If you just look at checking which TCP/IP packets were captured, that's already way too much work for five politicians in the oversight committee. This was not addressed at all either.
Using encryption was not addressed. The fact that the secret service would be legally allowed to break into people's systems was not addressed in the public debate. Most of the debate revolved around whether the government spying on its citizens is correct in principle.
Technical capability and what is possible today were never discussed.
How the suspects would be identified was declared secret, with nobody except the oversight committee of those five politicians being allowed an insight into it.
So, I stand with the previous poster that people did not know what we know, and they voted based on incorrect assumptions and misrepresentation or outright omission, whether unintentional or intentional, of technical capability and facts.
Benjamin Franklin's quote seems very appropriate in this case:
those who would trade liberty for little personal safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
"Technical assumptions were incorrect. The technical capability was misrepresented."
Your response really doesn't say this. It's just a bunch of opinion and says "i wish they had presented additional info i believe matters".
That falls squarely within the studies i pasted, which show both that people always think this would change result, and that people are pretty much always wrong when they think this, and that it does not change results.
"One of the main arguments for this initiative was that the secret service would only be allowed to look at the packet traffic of the affected target, but the reality is that in order to capture just that traffic, all packets are captured and filtered out first;"
This is not necessarily true of course. You can, in fact, filter on the fly if you want to. Deep packet inspection at link speed is a thing.
"also, there is no technology in existence to prevent the secret service to packet capturing everything."
In what sense, exactly?
You can make this happen at the level that any such thing would be noticed immediately, and would require incredible numbers of people to conspire. You can make it audited by as many independent people as you want.
If you mean "there are always ways around this if enough people conspire", that is a generally true statement about the world, and people already know this. Again, the fact that you think this matters very heavily, and others do not, does not make everyone else ignorant or misinformed.
"Also asserted was that the secret service has and will have good oversight of all activities. The committee consists of only five people. And these people are all politicians currently in the government. If you just look at checking which TCP/IP packets were captured, that's already way too much work for five politicians in the oversight committee. This was not addressed at all either.
"
This is a strong opinion/prediction of yours (along with some casual classism and denigration of "politicians" for no reason), and may or may not turn out to be factually correct. This is not a misrepresentation on anyone's part, and is certainly not falsifiable yet. It sounds like an objective presentation was made of the plan. You disagree with the viability and usefulness of that plan. That, again, is not a misrepresentation or omission. It simply means you have a possible difference of opinion with others as to the viability. I don't even see an argument for what "additional" data was missing here, just that you don't like politicians and think they won't be able to keep up.
"Using encryption was not addressed. The fact that the secret service would be legally allowed to break into people's systems was not addressed in the public debate."
But known and objectively presented from all things i can find. I know you can't believe people would be okay with such a thing, but it's entirely within the realm of possibility that people are indeed okay with such a thing.
"Technical capability and what is possible today were never discussed."
This is an opinion.
"How the suspects would be identified was declared secret, with nobody except the oversight committee of those five politicians being allowed an insight into it."
Where's the misrepresentation or missing data?
"So, I stand with the previous poster that people did not know what we know, and they voted based on incorrect assumptions and misrepresentation or outright omission, whether unintentional or intentional, of technical capability and facts."
I strongly disagree, at least based on what you've presented.
These are not misrepresentations, they are simply "presentations that did not present it from your point of view". That is not misrepresentation, because you are not the source of absolute truth. It's misrepresentation if it wasn't presented objectively false or misleading, not subjectively false or misleading.
Pretty much any controversial thing that is voted on that a given set of folks disagree with is considered to have been presented subjectively false or misleading by those people.
You also added "incorrect assumptions". You are basically offering opinions that you think others opinion's are wrong. Certainly you must realize you are not necessarily right?
You can't simply say "everyone else's assumptions are wrong, and therefore they are ignorant", when your assumptions are based on opinions about the state of the world.
Past that, IMHO, you've not made an effective case that people were ignorant here.
You've instead made an effective case that the studies i cited are correct, among other things.
Thanks for this. I couldn't agree more. The way political discourse works at the moment is worrying. America is in the spotlight for this, but it happens in europe too. Entrenched camps diagnosing each other with all kinds of mental deficiencies without discussing the actual topic at hand.
> FWIW: This is literally the retort everyone has to anything they disagree with that gets approved.
Probably because it's true in most cases. Most people don't have a deep understanding of even a single issue, let alone multiple.
This could have very well been another "Brexit-like" vote in Switzerland, where people were just scaremongered into voting for the law without understanding all of the implications.
"Probably because it's true in most cases. Most people don't have a deep understanding of even a single issue, let alone multiple.
"
What evidence do you have of this?
As far as i'm aware, research studies basically show that providing more facts one way or the other only makes people's convictions stronger. It doesn't change their minds that often. It's actually incredibly hard to change people's minds.
Now, you are free to argue this is completely irrational, and i'd 100% agree.
But it does mean that people know what you know and understand what you understand and still disagree. Whether that makes sense to do so or not.
"Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest"
Like I said, i'd strongly argue comprehension is not the problem.
Until people realize that is the case, and stop just dismissing anyone who disagrees as ignorant, nothing will change.
What factual information do you think is missing from peoples' understanding. In my experience people assume the government is doing more spying than it is.
> This could have very well been another "Brexit-like" vote in Switzerland, where people were just scaremongered into voting for the law without understanding all of the implications.
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.
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.
That requirement for a court order is greatly diminished by Art. 30: Verfahren bei Dringlichkeit. It establishes that the federal intelligence service can tap wires without court orders in urgent cases. And let's be honest here, if tapping a wire turns up nothing, do you really expect them to follow the protocol and actually inform the agencies (like the federal administrative court)? I don't have that level of trust in the intelligence service.
That's the thing isn't it. If I don't trust my government to follow the law, then it doesn't matter what surveillance law we have. The whole vote was a vote of confidence as a result.
He didn't say, that he does not trust the government, he has problems trusting the intelligence service. The Swiss intelligence service did prove often enough that you can't trust him to respect the law or being especially talented to do his job in a appropriate way.
Sure, still a vote about trust though. My point being that you are asking people if they trust a certain government entity or not. Apparently the trust is there.
They most certainly do NOT need a court order. Art. 40. and 41. are only relevant if the sender and receiver are located in Switzerland. What a "sender and receiver" exactly means (User, Website, Server, Router, ...) is not defined, imho by intention.
That's not at all how I understand it, though I am not a lawyer.
Art. 38 basically says that the Nachrichtendienst can intercept data, unless sender and receiver are Swiss (those are indeed defined broadly). Paragraph 2 of Art. 38 basically excludes all swiss-to-swiss cable-communication for the remainder of the text.
Art. 39 then says there needs to be a court order (though there are emergency provisions).
It is my understanding of those laws that a Swiss to Swiss sender/receiver connection may never be intercepted, while all other connections may be intercepted by following Art. 40. and 41.
I also live and work in Zurich in a 'techie' job and almost everyone is happy with the new surveillance laws and powers. They are sensible, needed and have the correct number of safeguards. Why do you think they go too far?
1.) There have been "safeguards" also at the time of the "Vichen" affair.
2.) The swiss "intelligence service" isn't famous for his intelligence. They should first do their homework on counterintelligence before anything else. Else they will just be used as a Proxy for foreign intelligence services.
I also work in Zürich. I hate this. They are interducing survailance and searches without court orders. The security of my device should be valued at least as highly as the security of my apperment.
Quite honstly, in my apparment their is nothing of interest to be found. However, my hole live is on my phone, my computer and my servers.
I would infact argue that these should have stronger protection. How anybody who supports democracy and the rule of law can agree with things like that, is quite frankly beyond me.
Has anybody, ever, in the history of this type of surveillance, provided concrete proof of the effectiveness thereof against the supposed threats that are used to justify it?
So your opinion is that they are good, but why? "They have the correct number of safeguards," only provides me enough information to know that you think they are good because there is a number of safeguards (what are they?) greater than 1.
My point is shouldn't the burden be on providing evidence for why they are good? Why do we need them? Why are they sensible? What was wrong before that this will fix? What can go wrong that will be prevented?
Phrasing an opinion like this, to me, raises more questions than it answers.
Yes there are three approvals needed before the enhanced surveillance can be used. Also they only expect it to be used about ten times a year. I wonder if you read the article before commenting, or just have an absolute position that anytime surveillance is mentioned you say it's bad.
The irony here is that the point of my comment is that an absolute position without any substantiation, in this case, raised more questions than it answered.
Or maybe they do and are okay with the trade offs. Consider that Switzerland requires voting on each citizenship application. Different countries and cultures have different set of norms. E.g. I can see lots of East and South Asian countries adopting a similar approach.
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?
Sorry, the problem is that this is the heart of representational democratic systems. You don't need to be a expert, you trust blindly. To call for education here is to demand for the people to install linux as there government. It is not going to happen, because the strong point of this agreement is the fact that no citizen has to be a expert. The idea, to reeducate anyone into a expert on secret services, measurements and counter-measures is .. interesting.
Im actually by now for a randomly selected secret service jury. People who get selected by the dice, have the right to move freely within the secret service and the right to watch anything going on anytime.
If the outside find something disagreeable, it can present the jury a case and the jury will investigate (if necessary) and judge. It is replaced after a term.
Clearly governments bureaucrats ascending to power, can not be entrusted to control the most powerful tool they reach this way.
Swiss Democracy is Direct Democracy, not Representative Democracy. EDIT: Meaning similar but not the same, and the power ultimately rests with the people to make the decisions, thus providing some requirement for them to understand the issues, and not just leave it up to their representatives.
I keep hearing this line that only techies understand, but I think it's a problem of historical ignorance. The state education system has little incentive to inform people if its past abuses, so it seems people are blind to the history of state surveillance.
> it really boils down to not enough people understanding the issues and the problems.
Exactly. The systems we create are now about to become too complex for us to understand (the climax probably being the arrival of "AI"). But understanding the systems we live in is the basis for democracy. Are these the signs that democracy will only have been a transitional solution? And if so, what comes after democracy?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichenskandal (german language)