[HN Gopher] Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new survei...
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Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law
Author : taubek
Score : 193 points
Date : 2025-05-17 14:59 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techradar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techradar.com)
| juancroldan wrote:
| Another day, another digital illiterate politician trying to
| regulate the digital world
| OutOfHere wrote:
| And they will go where? To the Netherlands or Sweden? EU
| regulation applies there. They would have to go to Seychelles or
| Panama, but their servers would obviously still have to be
| elsewhere.
|
| Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.
| McDyver wrote:
| > "This revision attempts to implement something that has been
| deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only
| country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,"
| said Yen.
|
| They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance
| seems to be illegal
| mrweasel wrote:
| The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish
| government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that
| makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages
| illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of
| Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine"
| in a "please think of the children"-moment.
| codethief wrote:
| That's outrageous. Would you have a source for this?
| mrweasel wrote:
| There was a whole special interest group set up to handle
| the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law
| suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the
| previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care,
| as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who
| was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands
| itself as the party of law and justice, except when they
| don't like the verdicts apparently.
|
| You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in
| 2017 (again in Danish):
| https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-
| dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging
| unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by
| ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There
| is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom.
| The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish
| Engineers Union.
|
| There's a Wikipedia page on what is being logged and
| retained:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Denmark
|
| It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules
| and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected
| data, but the end result is that every single person in
| Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they
| go completely offline.
| bawolff wrote:
| That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body
| tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with
| the government than by definition its not illegal.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Norway has also been a popular destination for these types of
| services.
| speedgoose wrote:
| If someone knows a Norwegian datacentre offering colocation,
| that has no connection to USA, please let me know.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I have no experience with them, so not a recommendation,
| but perhaps https://greenmountain.no?
| speedgoose wrote:
| I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I'm
| afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation
| to contact their salesman means it's as expensive as it
| could be, but I'm sure Proton can afford.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Having worked in the hosting and colo business in
| Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few
| years, but you're starting around EUR500 per month (in
| 2016 I think we could get you started at EUR350) and
| frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a
| rack.
|
| Most hosting companies doesn't even really want
| colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.
| immibis wrote:
| That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean
| service. It's something you have to individually
| negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being
| able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within
| one provider. Colocation is not all the same.
| ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts
| that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly
| specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from
| when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean
| jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the
| individual differences didn't really matter.)
|
| There _are_ some places that have jellybean colocation
| offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business
| is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers,
| so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that
| business model), but it only covers a small portion of
| colocation possibilities.
|
| But typically colocation is just one of those products
| where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is.
| So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth
| the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a
| couple hundred dollars a month worth.
|
| By the way, the same is true for business internet
| access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as
| every residential user does), you get the same basic
| service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn
| enough money, your ISP _will_ negotiate with you. Though
| I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the
| "residential area == ordinary residential connection"
| assumption (and in many cases their network may not
| support certain upgrades). And it's true for business
| transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the
| best match off the shelf. You want five million screws,
| we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also
| related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars,
| the bank has a problem.)
| theMMaI wrote:
| They're owned by an israeli company nowadays fwiw
| mrweasel wrote:
| Oh, I missed that.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| They deploy Pegasus from there or what would Israeli
| company need in there ?
| theMMaI wrote:
| Seems mostly to be a real-estate investment but the
| ownership structure is a bit opaque. Their DCs host some
| critical infrastructure for banks.
| theMMaI wrote:
| There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the
| US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service
| (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.
|
| Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament,
| absolutely none have _any_ clue what so ever when it comes to
| IT security matters.
|
| The major parties have multiple times attemted to push
| egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our
| country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be
| a risk because only authorized personel would have access...
|
| Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| There are 5 million people living in Norway and you have 10
| parties in the parliament? Talk about divided country.
| pastage wrote:
| A continuous spectrum is only divided if it has too few
| bins.
| zukzuk wrote:
| Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a
| society. Much more so than just about any place i've
| spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit
| of diversity in certain things, politics being one -- but
| only within certain parameters, so I suspect the
| differences between the parties are more around specific
| issues up for debate than big ideological / identity
| concerns, as they are in the US, for example.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are
| currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not
| really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large
| number of parties.
|
| It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four
| parties can represent 80 million or more people. The
| truth is that many of the parties in countries like
| Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly
| agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark
| are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure
| many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in
| countries like the US, would be considered implementation
| details or narrow topics.
| kubb wrote:
| I assure you forcing everyone into one of two options
| results in way more division. You can probably imagine
| why.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| This is fairly common for smaller parliamentary systems;
| you can think of it as a side effect of proportional
| representation.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| This is quite normal in Europe.
|
| E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at
| least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them
| only have a very small number of seats.
| petre wrote:
| Lichtenstein is closer and uses the CHF.
| sealeck wrote:
| But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia
| has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to
| tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an
| absolute monarchy is a hindrance.
| sealeck wrote:
| This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if
| you have a legal problem there is a full court system set
| up that can help you - Liechstenstein is basically just a
| state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT)
| owned by the same man.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop
| "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment
| (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be
| compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of
| law enforcement.
|
| It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to
| protect peoples civil liberties than Australias
| westminster system.
| bawolff wrote:
| But it isn't.
|
| To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional
| monarchy".
|
| It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.
| sealeck wrote:
| It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't
| like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative
| arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European
| version of the UAE - not a great place to be.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.
| miohtama wrote:
| Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state
| control, hates privacy
|
| https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/a-dangero...
|
| It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end
| encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for
| this.
| maronato wrote:
| What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?
|
| The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all
| trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more
| state control, hates privacy
|
| Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Hot take but it makes sense to get rid of privacy under
| certain circumstances. What if we created a political
| system where you can trust the government to do a good,
| honest job. Privacy is needed because goals of the
| government aren't always aligned with goals of the society,
| but what if that wasn't the case.
| maronato wrote:
| Once you lose privacy, you can never get it back.
|
| The population may trust the government now, but
| totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love
| when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go
| straight into building or offshoring their gulags.
| hammock wrote:
| What happened to the ideas of offshore data centers and
| seasteading and pirate radio? Is it time to bring those back
| (again)?
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths
| governments.
|
| by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection
| before flight.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than
| putting it up?
|
| The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe
| destroying one satellite would destroy them all.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Is not changing BGP route cheaper than taking down a
| satanlite ? Sorry, satellite.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Isn 't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than
| putting it up?_
|
| Probably not for Starlink. You've got mass-manufactured
| satellites in a constellation launched on a reusable,
| profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand
| you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.
| bawolff wrote:
| It was always stupid, because that is not how laws work.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt
| have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info
| thousands a year its right on their transparency page.
| Batman8675309 wrote:
| Proton isn't giving up VPN users. It's giving up mail users.
| There's a huge legal difference.
| immibis wrote:
| All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to
| court orders, or men with guns will break into those
| addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.
| sschueller wrote:
| This law change died in the "Vernehmlassung" which is early in
| the process. It's dead with opposition from all sides of the
| political spectrum. It had no chance.
|
| https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehm...
| j45 wrote:
| It's odd people don't push for laws to prevent for these kinds
| of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Think of the children
| bdangubic wrote:
| every law is temporal, until it gets re-written or killed
| outright
| edent wrote:
| The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature
| of every legal system.
|
| Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this
| previous law".
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| This is what constitutions are for. When you have the
| support, you install a constitutional protection that says
| the government can't do this. Repealing the protection
| requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so
| changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing
| to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to
| 67%.
|
| Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of
| government so they'd all have to be repealed together by
| separate legislatures before the government is allowed to
| do it, discouraging the attempt.
| brnt wrote:
| Constitutions are amended all the time. The French even
| have a proces for reboots of the Republic.
|
| These are goods things.
| puzzledobserver wrote:
| The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure
| Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule
| constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict
| the "basic structure" of the constitution.
|
| It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to
| guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part
| of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.
|
| Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have
| adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and
| Uganda.
| landl0rd wrote:
| No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic.
| They are the framework that gives the government power
| and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too
| much or too often is bad.
|
| Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very
| little power to governments and focus mostly on
| constraining those governments. They should be changed
| very rarely.
|
| Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at
| lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or
| nowhere.
| greyw wrote:
| In Switzerland you can change the constitution with
| popular votes. That only requires for 50% of the voters
| to agree and half of the cantons.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Then get half the voters to agree to make it two thirds.
| After you put the other protections in, naturally.
| philistine wrote:
| You're arguing for massive changes to a very unique
| country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless
| you're Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I
| don't think you're arguing anything realistic.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they
| still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The
| existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if
| it isn't.
| kragen wrote:
| Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since
| before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief
| interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by
| Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700
| years was the best system for preventing
| authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer
| than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can
| go against the people that elected them.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's an additional check. That's good, but it isn't
| always sufficient, because sometimes you can convince 51%
| of people to do something wrong.
| j45 wrote:
| It sounds so easy to do
| timeflex wrote:
| And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to
| 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead.
| And might as well make sure there are only two major
| political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the
| constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing
| their pockets with foreign donations.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| These are independent problems.
|
| To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution,
| create remedies in each of the other branches of
| government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it
| should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get
| shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity
| when that ought not to happen, and there should be a
| better mechanism for states to challenge federal
| constitutional violations.
|
| The two-party system in the US is caused by first past
| the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not
| some other nonsense, a _rated voting system_ that removes
| the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting
| the number of parties.
|
| "The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve
| it, not why you give up.
| flir wrote:
| That's how you ossify.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If preventing the government from abusing the population
| is ossification then the government should be made
| entirely out of bones.
| Youden wrote:
| I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to
| the existing referendum system.
|
| After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100
| days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law
| will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the
| populace.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to
| rally against and convince people that the ends of
| stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil.
| The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support
| within the population for temporary periods of time, so
| you need a system that can prevent it even in that
| environment. This typically means that violations of
| fundamental rights should require significantly more than
| 51% popular support or require changes in public
| sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can
| make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US
| Senate being up for election every two years).
| j45 wrote:
| Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy
| if that's what the population has latest indicated, this
| kind of effort wouldn't always need yo be wasted.
|
| Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all
| the time seems like a deterrent.
| j45 wrote:
| An existing law can be different to change, than where non
| exists and its greenfield for something half baked to roll
| in.
| ncr100 wrote:
| Who sponsored this??
|
| Best I could find as a non Swiss:
|
| > Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis
| Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and
| telecommunications service, said that the requirements for
| service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A
| company like Threema would have the same obligations as before
| after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from
| the end of April. The Vupf revision would force the company to
| abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as
| technically required".
|
| (From auto translation of report about this already failing to
| proceed.)
|
| Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss
| government seeking to take authority over information?
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| Small logical question - How can proton deliver mail to you if
| it does not save anything ?
| LexiMax wrote:
| To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before
| that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of
| communication if only one side of the conversation is secure,
| given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?
| cfn wrote:
| The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal
| login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save
| your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key
| and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from
| reading the article).
| netsharc wrote:
| Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title
| properly...
|
| This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that
| dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling"
| division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance
| Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.
| croemer wrote:
| Title needs a dash after Google, otherwise it reads weirdly
| pmkary wrote:
| No more "Swiss-Privacy" then.
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