Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37465853

by benevol • 10 years ago

158 82 10 years ago

sebiw• 10 years ago

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

benevol3• 10 years 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 (german language)

pmoriarty• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

move to a remote area, and become self-sufficient

this behavior may even be considered 'radical' enough to warrant more direct surveillance.

gscott• 10 years ago

Samaritan is a great system anyone who says otherwise....

kakoni• 10 years ago

Heres the English wikipedia link, "Secret files scandal" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal

andreasley3• 10 years 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.

l33tbro2• 10 years 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.

etqwzutewzu2• 10 years ago

"Documents were collected for up to 700 000 people (about 10% of the population)"

Is the 700'000 people the total between 1900 and 1990? In this case the "10% of the population" number is probably wrong.

benevol3• 10 years 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-...

raverbashing3• 10 years ago

While exaggerated responses are not good, ignoring it is not beneficial and will only result in more extreme responses later on.

folli• 10 years 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• 10 years 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

rasur4• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

Yup, this was also my understanding. Nothing like what the NSA or other agencies would do.

jasonkostempski• 10 years ago

Isn't that what surveillance started as in the U.S.? Give 'em an inch...

tobltobs4• 10 years 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.

benevol3• 10 years ago

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?

planetjones3• 10 years ago

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?

raverbashing3• 10 years ago

Because some people are either blind or severely minimise existing threats, often while maximising other threats

tobltobs4• 10 years ago

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.

nickik2• 10 years ago

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.

wallace_f2• 10 years ago

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.

DannyBee3• 10 years ago

"I think it really boils down to not enough people understanding the issues and the problems."

FWIW: This is literally the retort everyone has to anything they disagree with that gets approved.

It's unrelated to surveillance.

People always assume "if only people knew what i knew, they would have agreed with me". This is a really bad assumption.

In fact, most of the time, i'd argue exactly the opposite:

People understood fine, they just disagree.

rasur4• 10 years ago

Apparently so.

sgift• 10 years ago

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.

mtgx2• 10 years ago

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.

ponyfleisch2• 10 years ago

People understood fine, they just disagree.

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.

Annatar3• 10 years ago

People understood fine, they just disagree.

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.

programmarchy• 10 years ago

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.

aub3bhat• 10 years ago

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.

sebgr• 10 years ago

Only some cantons require voting on citizenship, the others have a more formal process.

Pica_soO• 10 years ago

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.

rasur4• 10 years ago

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.

It's a subtle difference.

kyledrake• 10 years 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• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

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

BafS• 10 years ago

For information, all "cantons" (26) approved this vote. You can see the details here: https://www.admin.ch/gov/en/start/documentation/votes/201609...

mtgx2• 10 years 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).

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate, what aside from bank accounts what else was part of the era of "Swiss privacy."

nickik2• 10 years 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.

bogomipz3• 10 years ago

What is the BND?

confounded• 10 years ago

Iceland may be a better bet.

andreasley3• 10 years 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• 10 years 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-...

FreeFull• 10 years ago

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

bogomipz3• 10 years 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• 10 years 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.

da_n• 10 years 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• 10 years ago

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

Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

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