In news that sounds familiar to those of us on this side of the pond, the BBC brings an update on the Swiss referendum that challenged an expansion of surveillance powers that passed the Swiss parliament in 2015; the expansion won the approval of roughly 65% of voters. This should raise a few eyebrows, considering Switzerland’s reputation for neutrality and their stance on privacy. Given the attacks on their neighbors in France and Belgium in the past year, the bill is an understandable reaction — until you realize the it was initially proposed in June of last year, prior to those attacks. However, it may explain the outcome of the recent vote.
Parallels can certainly be drawn between the recent vote in Switzerland and what has happened in the US in the past two or so decades. Currently, the Swiss intelligence community may only rely on publicly-available data. From the above-linked Swissinfo article:
The new legislation being proposed would allow the FIS [Federal Intelligence Service] to carry out investigations in public and private spheres without the authorisation of a judge.
The BBC further details:
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.
This sounds similar to the US FISA court, which is more or less a rubber stamp for the NSA — according to EPIC, only 12 of the over 38,000 warrant requests were rejected from 1979 to 2015.
Supporters of the expansion claim it will help Switzerland “catch up with other countries.” This seems like vague language, but consider Switzerland is a member of the 41 Eyes. Further consider its neighbors are closer to the original members of the 5 Eyes (France and the Netherlands are both 9 Eyes members; Belgium the 14 Eyes), and that sentiment becomes more clear -- supporters don't want to be left out of signals intelligence. If history is an indicator, the supporters of this expansion will not be satisfied with non-generalized surveillance.
I am not Swiss, but I hope Switzerland and others can learn from other countries’ past mistakes. The bill is due to go into law 1 Sept 2017.