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.
You must log in or # to comment.
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.)
Why is this world and timeline so hell bent on recreating dystopian sci fi novels from the 80s?
Because they were about late state capitalism.
two factors:
- those novels were warnings about the path we were on
- dorkasses like musk and altman missed the allegorical point
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?
As much as it’s dumb, many other places (such as Australia, where I live) are similar at this point.
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.
Yeah, the whole “private banking” history thing the EFF seems to lionize in the article was 100% just for serving lucrative international robber barrons and other criminals. It was never about protecting regular citizens privacy.
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…
Those are all very bad, but on the other hand their flag is a big plus.
It’s also a big red flag.
