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Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

bbc.com

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Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#61

Post by planetjones »

nickik wrote: post #49
planetjones wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 s…

Where's your source for this? The enhanced surveillance can only be used if authorised by a court, the defence ministry and cabinet.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#62

Post by gscott »

pmoriarty wrote: post #35
benevol wrote: post #3

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)

"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 re…

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

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#63

Post by planetjones »

wallace_f wrote: post #57
planetjones wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 w…

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#64

Post by wallace_f »

planetjones wrote: post #63
wallace_f wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#65

Post by href »

jcfrei wrote: post #53
href wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They most certainly do need a court order. See Art. 40 and Art. 41. of the NDG.

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…

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#66

Post by ponyfleisch »

DannyBee wrote: post #17
rasur wrote: post #5

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.…

"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 underst…

> 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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#67

Post by ponyfleisch »

mtgx wrote: post #28
DannyBee wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 underst…

> 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.

> 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.

Or maybe you are wrong about the brexit vote too?

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#68

Post by folli »

benevol wrote: post #4

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-...

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#69

Post by tobltobs »

href wrote: post #65
jcfrei wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#70

Post by tobltobs »

href wrote: post #42
tobltobs wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They most certainly do need a court order. See Art. 40 and Art. 41. of the NDG.

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.
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