Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 86 posts

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#71

Post by Iv »

axlee wrote: post #56
l33tbro wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ch…

> 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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#72

Post by Iv »

l33tbro wrote: post #47
andreasley wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 ch…

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

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#73

Post by saiya-jin »

folli wrote: post #68
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…

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

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#74

Post by Annatar »

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.

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#75

Post by andreasley »

Iv wrote: post #71
axlee wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#76

Post by href »

tobltobs wrote: post #69
href wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#77

Post by Annatar »

rayiner wrote: post #34
mtgx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

See my comment above about which factual information was never discussed, and which information was misrepresented, and which was omitted.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#78

Post by Annatar »

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.

My impression is that it was a vote spurned by desire for security and stability, before anything else.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#79

Post by href »

tobltobs wrote: post #70
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.

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.

Re: Swiss endorse new surveillance powers

#80

Post by rasur »

Annatar wrote: post #74
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…

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 on…

I cannot up-vote you enough for your response. Thanks for filling in the gaps.
Post reply on HN