- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.world
The proposed update to Switzerland’s Ordinance on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF: Verordnung über die Überwachung des Post- und Fernmeldeverkehrs) represents a significant expansion of state surveillance powers, worse than the surveillance powers of the USA. If enacted, it would have serious consequences for encrypted services such as Threema, an encrypted WhatsApp alternative and Proton Mail as well as VPN providers based in Switzerland.
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Switzerland never had solid privacy laws - and is known for intelligence service overreach for decades.
They had a Stasi like system of “who to imprison” when “the time comes”.
They listen to all IP traffic in and out the country - which is concerning in times of traffic pattern analysis. And they are known for their close cooperation with US intelligence services.
Protons (and Threemas) claim of “soo good swiss privacy laws” is nothing more than swiss-washing. And they know it.
Proton has already given away data of its customers (climate activists) to the swiss authorities. And only talked about it when the press got onto it.
This would be catastrophic to Proton AG
In their AI announcement yesterday they mentioned that they are moving to the EU because of legal protections.
The region that repeatedly insists on backdoors in any encrypted communications?
Link?
https://proton.me/blog/lumo-ai
Read the Building EuroStack for the Future section
Looked cool, Too bad it’s brainwashed like all the others.
Why is this world and timeline so hell bent on recreating dystopian sci fi novels from the 80s?
two factors:
- those novels were warnings about the path we were on
- dorkasses like musk and altman missed the allegorical point
Yea, true. And sad. We’re fucked
Because they were about late state capitalism.
“In a democracy, the right way is to argue, not threaten to leave.” Socialist member of parliament said.
Does this man understand the very first day this law would approve Proton is dead? Do politicians understand privacy at all?
Considering that we might have a World War III or 2nd American Civil War in a decade or two, it would be foolish of Switzerland to not permit encrypted VPN. A stable neutrality is very profitable in a world of uncertainty.
Switzerland ‽ really ?
Holy shit. An actual interrobang.
This is like finding a shiny.
This is the first thing I’ve ever disliked about Switzerland (not that I know a lot about the country).
You’ve not heard of shady banking, Nazi gold, reluctance to stop dealing with Russia, women not being able to vote until the 70s, and Nestle?
Switzerland gets aggressively simped for online, and there’s certainly some nice things about them, but there’s also some pretty awful things.
Those are all very bad, but on the other hand their flag is a big plus.
It’s also a big red flag.
Hold up now! I’ll have you know in some parts of the country women couldn’t vote until the 90s! Also unmarried cohabitation was illegal in some cantons until the 80s and paternity leave as a concept only exists in Switzerland since the 00s.
US is still lacking that last item…
I meant current times, not in the past. Sorry, I assumed that would be obvious. There are also some things I like about Germany, though they have a pretty terrible past.
Nazi gold didn’t disappear after the Nazis fell. They still pocketed it all, despite knowing where all that wealth came from, and did fuck all to help rebuild Europe.
Other things like their appeasing attitude towards Russia, reluctance to allow weapons exports to Ukraine, and willingness to export weapons to awful regimes are all unambiguously current.
Huh. On the surface, they don’t sound very neutral on the weapons stuff 😕. TIL. I wonder what their underlying reasoning for this is
Money, it’s always money…
Reluctance to stop dealing with Russia is a single positive in the list.
Oh look, one of Lemmy’s many resident tankies.
Oh look, another one who’s brain has been melted by propaganda.
Imagine simping for a foreign threat actor
Ah, yes. The country that formerly let you have anonymous secret bank accounts.
You account is anonymous only if you have over a billion.
or are american
Why would non-billionaire Americans get special treatment?
when legislation removes a whole well know phrase in one fell swoop. Bye bye “swiss bank account”
There’ll be a clause that banks are exempt
There might be but you ruined my quip!
It was inevitable. What did you all expect from the country that hoarded all that nazi gold?
Isnt Switzerland the country that struggled with their covid response because of the direct democracy requirements lacking provisions for such changes…amazing they can figure everything out to hurt the public.
I visited Switzerland just after the vaccines dropped. The Swiss COVID response far surpassed the response in the United States. They rolled out a nation-wide app for vaccination attestation, and any museum, restaurant, etc. could scan a QR code on someone’s phone with a phone. But do they have a scary, socially reactionary subset of their population? Yes.
In some harmful ways they are fanatically culturally conservative. But they also care about community, sustainability, health, the well-being of children, environmental preservation, organization, and self-reliance. Being a small, rich, homogeneous, topographically-isolated country drives these characteristics.
Surveillance State developments are depressing but not surprising.
what covid response? our government simply played on “eigenverantwortung” (personal responsibility). in a country with one of the highest education levels it wasn’t difficult to keep a distance of 2 meters during the peak of the pandemic unless you’re surrounding yourself with naive people. I was able to go swimming in the lake in the summer, and skiing in the winter while Italy, France and Austria had this banned. weird to think about it but I honestly had a pretty fun time during covid and made some of the best friends to date during it. hell, we even had music festivals and our numbers were not horrible. I think you’re thinking of Sweden. happens a lot.
If I have to fucking switch mail hosts again… what the hell is the point in using proton for privacy and now I’m sure that’s going to get ruined.
Wasn’t there an announcement from proton a few days back to possibly move their data Centers out of Switzerland because of this?
they’ve been threatening this for year to keep suckling at the tit of governmental subsidies to make Switzerland look more attractive for investors with them being here. I doubt they’ll follow through.
It depends, privacy has been their entire marketing pitch forever.
Note that this is written by Tuta, Protonmails main concurrent
@poutinewharf commented a screenshot of Proton’s post, but the headline was about their AI chatbot, and the news about the Swiss move is buried at the end.
Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals(new window) to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.
No fucking way, but mah direct democracy …
So. Switzerland doesn’t really have fully direct democracy in the necessary sense. It’s still an old nation-state with laws made in the olden day when you had to compromise. There are many cases where the “direct” part is optional and requires interested people to assemble signatures yadda-yadda. Not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal. That aside, its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing. Which means that for some issues it will always drift shitward.
It also has separation of 3 kinds of government by degree of locality, but not separation of the “an entity ensuring food safety can’t regulate telecommunications” or “an entity regulating police labor safety can’t regulate riot police acceptable action” kinds.
(Which is why I usually refer to my preference for a kind of “direct democracy” as a revised one-level Soviet system with mandatory rotation, plenty of places and sortition to state worker roles, despite that not having very good connotations.)
This is not law yet. The Federal Council (the executive) has started a consultation process at the beginning of the year which ended in May. They are now looking at all the feedback that came in, that was - unsurprisingly - exclusively negative from all sides. If the responsible minister wants to go ahead with it, it goes to the Federal Council for a vote. If they approve it, this would be a decree to change an existing decree and that would come into effect next year or the year after.
And this is where direct democracy comes in: If this is the case anyone can start getting signatures for a public initiative which would change the constitution to prohibit such practices. In fact anyone can start doing that now. If it succeeds, then it’ll come to a popular vote. Threema (a secure chat provider) has already announced that they would do that and I’m sure that they wouldn’t be the only ones to band together in this.
The process might take long, but this is in no way “not good enough to counter a campaign for legal change with a goal” and in fact has happened multiple times in the past. Hence why Switzerland has a direct vote on issues every few months because of something called “Referendum”, whereby a popular vote can be forced on an issue passing through parliament. I might have my criticisms of the political system, but this ain’t it.
its system encourages it to have politicians as a thing
Well yes, there is some level of representation, so over 8 million people don’t have to decide every little detail on 1000s of changes of law. The system is built upon a “milita” system. I.e. politicians usually have a job. So people have the possibility to vote in experts or their vicinity and know that they won’t solely be career politicians. Unfortunately the laws around financing and propaganda are rather lax, giving an advantage to the rich, which leads to an over-representation of the capitalist class with occupations such as lawyers and business-owners and a clear under-representation of classical working-class jobs such as craftspeople or office workers. This is amendable though to correct the mismatch, if people realize their class interest and don’t fall for the same right-wing propaganda of a party whose playbook has been inspired by the US GOP for decades and who is inspiring Germany’s AfD now.
The main downside of the system imo has to do with people with no knowledge on an issue having to weigh in on them and therefore how powerful propaganda campaigns can be, which means that money buys power, as in every other existing so-called democracy - direct or not. Especially with how money shifts power away from the populace, this is inherent to capitalistic systems and it would be on the populace to protect itself from it. With enough propaganda though, people keep voting for more power of capital unbeknownst to them or not, just as they might vote against their interests on other things. The fact that you have to convince so many people, who hopefully do have some degree of education, makes it a lot harder though, for big capitalists to reach their goals, compared to less direct systems. And I know of several examples, how such a vote did not go in favor of big capital. What usually makes the difference is whether they succeed in portraying their advantage as the advantage of all.
Where’s that dude who was saying Proton was enabling terrorism for threatening to leave the country?
