Revision of Swiss surveillance law VÜPF would directly target VPN & encrypted chat and email providers based in Switzerland.

  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
    124·
    2 days ago

    Very thorough and informative article (even if from an interested source).

    IMO the fact that even Switzerland is going here should tell us that the privacy camp is not really winning this whole argument.

    And personally I’m even slightly divided on it myself. If we look at this through the lens of legacy offline equivalence, there was never a guarantee of privacy in the pre-encryption era, even in democracies. For two people corresponding with each other, the police have always been able to ask for warrants to spy on mail and tap phone calls. In practice, privacy depended more on obscurity, and the fact that data-mining phone calls and mail was not possible. Now take a group chat with 1000 people - to ask for total privacy for such a conversation in the pre-internet time was just a logistical impossibility. These are the “common-sense” arguments that the police and - let’s face it - many ordinary people today find pretty persuasive. Countering them is going to be hard. Especially since there clearly are cases where bad stuff is plotted in the secrecy of encrypted spaces. Organized crime of all kinds, terrorist attacks, even genocide (over Whatsapp in Myanmar and elsewhere). To win this argument, we’re going to need convincing answers for all this.

    One good answer is that (as I understand it) human intelligence (i.e. infiltration) has always been more effective for police than the “lazy” option of signals intelligence.

    Then there’s the natural expectation of privacy argument. IMO this is very persuasive for 2-person conversations. Personally I find it absolutely outrageous that some policeman, for purposes of “public safety”, could just listen in to my private conversation with a single friend. Maybe this is a Western mindset. I’m not sure that in China everyone feels this way.

    But a total guarantee of privacy for group conversations of 10, 1000, 1 million? Perhaps. But among the general public that argument is yet to be won.

    • r4venw@sh.itjust.works
      13·
      2 days ago

      This isn’t a necessarily me arguing with you, just some thoughts.

      • We have already seen multiple instances of law enforcement misusing technology (Flock, for example) with or without a warrent. Before these technologies, it was a lot less convenient to do this.
      • It is illegal to open someone else’s mail without permission. I think this is the case in a lot of places? We don’t have a similar digital concept (probably because the post office is a government service and digital stuff is corporate).
      • Before this technological era, if the police wanted to wiretap someone or follow them, they wouldn’t immediately have access to every single thing theyve said or done before that point in time. I think that is also quite important if we’re comparing/contrasting
      • WanderingThoughts@europe.pub
        5·
        2 days ago

        We have already seen multiple instances of law enforcement misusing technology (Flock, for example) with or without a warrent. Before these technologies, it was a lot less convenient to do this.

        And that goes further into government. Do you trust your government to see everything you ever wrote? And if you do trust this government, do you still trust it when their opponents win?

        There’s also the psychological impact. Just knowing you’re being watched is taxing in several different ways.

        • Kissaki@feddit.orgEnglish
          4·
          1 day ago

          It’s also worth it to distinguish between government, police, prosecution, and secret agencies. Just one of them has to be malicious/untrustworthy/incompetent, with enough conformity/disinterest by the others - the latter of which is often a given. It’s not just one party or agency and attack vector we become vulnerable to.