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Swiss Government Backs Privacy Oriented ISP

Posted by samzenpus on from the eyes-on-your-own-screen dept.

judgecorp writes "The Swiss government owned telco Swisscom is pitching a "Swiss Cloud" operator which promises to keep customers' credentials private in the wake of the NSA spying scandal. Switzerland has strict privacy laws, with which the Swisscom cloud complies, and the operator now wants to offer that more widely."

30 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. strict privacy laws my ass! by larry+bagina · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They used to have strict banking secrecy laws, too.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    1. Re:strict privacy laws my ass! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      This. I am a dual citizen, USA and Switzerland, I live in the US. I had a bank account in Switzerland with less than $2k in it. Last year the Swiss bank closed out my account and sent me the funds. The Swiss government caved in to pressure from the US and changed it's banking laws. They will do the same thing with internet privacy.

    2. Re:strict privacy laws my ass! by pixelpusher220 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Wasn't one of Snowden's 'triggers' to his document releases the blatant rights violations of the Swiss at the behest of the NSA?

      --
      People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people :-D
    3. Re:strict privacy laws my ass! by bsolar · · Score: 5, Informative

      Strict bank secrecy laws were not amended: to do that the government would actually need to change the constitution, since that's where this protection is defined. Every change to the constitution needs to be approved by popular vote, so even if the government caves in to the US requests, it has to actually convince the majority of Swiss voters to approve the amendments in the mandatory vote. What actually happened is that many Swiss banks got threatened with lawsuits in the US and decided that US customers were more hassle than they were worth it.

    4. Re:strict privacy laws my ass! by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 2

      Actually it was the CIA. He witnessed a Swiss banker be turned into a CIA asset through someone getting him drunk and making him drive. So not only was this an immoral entrapment scheme, but it also sounds quite dangerous (what if he had crashed?). Of course, he should have not driven when drunk, but who knows how persuasive the CIA can get. For all we know they spiked his drink.

  2. doesn't matter by Moblaster · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's clear this is merely some darknet to protect the black market for Swiss chocolate smuggling. But at last my secret Toblerone stash will be untraceable. So I got that going for me.

  3. the Swiss don't need you by Gothmolly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The nice thing about this is that short of invading, there's no way to pressure the Swiss to do anything that they don't want to do. They produce their own energy, they make a crapload of money, and every adult male owns an assault rifle (security of a free state, keep and bear arms, etc. etc.). They can afford to give the NSA the finger.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
    1. Re:the Swiss don't need you by fph+il+quozientatore · · Score: 2

      short of invading

      There's the issue.

      --
      My first program:

      Hell Segmentation fault

    2. Re:the Swiss don't need you by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's the issue.

      What issue?

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    3. Re:the Swiss don't need you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a swiss guy (born and living here): you have some good point, unfortunately and sadly they are wrong.

      * Guns: Adult males (which are required to do military service) have a gun, but no ammo at home. No self-defence for us.
      * Energy: we produce some energy and sell it during the day to other countries. During night, we buy it back at a far lower price to fill up the dams. There is give and take, and economic mostly us as winners.
      * Crapload of money: yes there are some, like banks/etc. The common rabble doesn't. Life is very expensive here in Switzerland, except the iPhones.
      * Finger to the NSA: I'd wish, but but our ministers do *always* what the USA is asking, often in advance.

      So: no. We are USAs bitch like many, many others.

      (unfortunately I forgot my password, therefore: anonymous swiss coward)

    4. Re:the Swiss don't need you by king+neckbeard · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's a pretty hard sell. They're white, they don't have natural resources, and they are known for neutrality. In fact, that's one of the reasons that nobody tries to fuck with Switzerland. The value of having a neutral territory far outweighs the value of pursuing a particular agenda.

      --
      This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
    5. Re:the Swiss don't need you by cold+fjord · · Score: 3, Funny

      The value of having a neutral territory far outweighs the value of pursuing a particular agenda.

      The value of capturing a series of heavily defended localities adjacent to and in a mountain range tends to be outweighed by the cost of doing so. Rubble and ruin is a poor exchange for blood and treasure.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    6. Re:the Swiss don't need you by mlts · · Score: 2

      What can be done is to use the Swiss data center as a passthrough for encryption.

      That way, you have your site -> intermediate storage provider -> destination cloud provider, with both your site and the intermediate provider doing passthrough encryption. This can be changed with public key encryption to the intermediate providers only stepping in to decrypt data with their private key [1]. Encrypted data would just go directly from the client to the end cloud provider.

      That way, for data to be accessed without authorization, it would take the destination cloud provider, the intermediate providers with their keys, and the client to all be compromised.

      [1]: Or more technically using a symmetric algorithm with the key protected by a public key algorithm a la OpenPGP.

    7. Re:the Swiss don't need you by cold+fjord · · Score: 5, Informative

      That's a pretty hard sell. They're white...

      The US has fought repeatedly against nations populated primarily by white people when there was cause. That includes Britain (1776, 1812), Germany (1917, 1941), Italy (1941), Spain (1898), France (1798), and the whites and white government of the Confederate States of America (1861). The US was ready to go to war for 50 years (1947-1991) against the largely white Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania) in Eastern Europe, and intervened in the Russian civil war (1918). There appears to be a problem with your race based theory. Too many people here have "brown on the brain." (We'll pass in silence over the wars in Asia.) The issue is the behavior of the nation in question, not the color of its population.

      --
      much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
    8. Re:the Swiss don't need you by Luckyo · · Score: 4, Informative

      Buy ammunition, get arrested, go to jail.

      Many people don't know that beyond the weird NRA-based claims of "armed nation", swiss men have assault rifles at home disassembled and with no ammunition. Assembling the rifle and taking it out of your home without special permission is a crime. Having ammunition for it without special permission is also a crime. They brought down their mainly assault rifle based gun crime down hard with that policy.

      That said, their army has excellent plans on how to distribute ammo in event of threat of war.

    9. Re:the Swiss don't need you by bsolar · · Score: 2

      Bank secrecy is not absolute, it merely means you need to get a warrant if you want to inspect someone's bank data, and if you actually have good reasons to believe that someone is doing something fishy the warrant is not an issue. What many foreign states want is actually unlimited access to any and all customers data without the need for probable cause, which is against the Swiss constitution.

    10. Re:the Swiss don't need you by Luckyo · · Score: 2, Informative

      As far as I remember they had similar pattern of domestic violence that Kosovo has. I.e. instead of knives, or small arms most wounds were high energy ballistic (caused by high power assault rifles), which are far more serious in nature.

      It's not that they had a lot of it. It's that the pattern of this particular form of crime, which usually takes form of "most accessible weapon" was significantly more fatal than that in neighboring countries. By removing easy access to ammo, domestic violence cases went to more traditional "knives, flying pans and small arms" that gives victims a much higher chance of survival.

    11. Re:the Swiss don't need you by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 2

      (unfortunately I forgot my password, therefore: anonymous swiss coward)

      Your password is 228ghx!@.

      Kind regards,
      Swiss Federal Intelligence Service.

  4. Horrible pun ahead. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Swisscom? I hear their privacy is...full of holes.

    1. Re:Horrible pun ahead. by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 2

      Cheesy joke.

  5. Re:Speed of...light. by fred911 · · Score: 4, Funny

    What is slower latency?

        Duplicate redundancy.

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    09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  6. Why did Swisscom exec commit suicide? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I notice there's a lot of suicides connected to telecoms.

    Kostas Tsalikidis, shortly after the Vodafone bugging of the Greek government was discovered.,
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostas_Tsalikidis

    Adamo Bove, committed suicide by throwing himself onto a freeway after finding out about 'Radar' (like an Italian Tempora):
    http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.15/italy

    Just out of interest, I noticed a senior Swisscom exec killed himself in July this year, shortly after the Snowden leaks, it could be unrelated and maybe it was related to his marriage breakup 4 years earlier, but worth digging in light of the other two deaths and the timing.

    I recall Snowden mentioned CIA's activities in Geneva from his days there, (getting bankers on drunk driving charges to gain leverage). Which puts a question mark in my mind about a Swisscom cloud:
    http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-describes-cia-tricks-2013-6

  7. Swisscom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Swisscom is the last company you would want to do this - I was working for one of the large banks here and to VPN from home to the office on Swisscom you had to have a static IP otherwise it was routed through Germany which wasn't good for Swiss banking secrecy.

  8. This is going to be huge by comrade1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I live in Switzerland. I was never quite happy with the european cloud computing providers I found because they were based in places like the uk, france, etc. Eventually I did find a swiss company but they were small and not feature-rich (compared to aws). I've worked with swisscom in the past on tech projects and they are extremely competent. I look forward to see what they come up with. And related to this, I've been looking into investments that will take advantage of europeans moving their data back to europe and requirements/laws for purchasing non-u.s. networking equipment. I found some good investments for companies on the hardware side, and I think this might be a good investment on the computing side.

  9. Is it just my cynicism.... by argStyopa · · Score: 2

    ...or are all these proposals for 'new' 'secure' cloud and email systems probably doing nothing more than waking up the NSA that they can't just doze through bulk downloads of foreign-traffic data any longer?

    I mean seriously, the tyros in the NSA are probably *welcoming* the new challenge of some serious crypto to crack...and most of these new programs are going to be hacked and downloading again almost unhindered by lunchtime of launch day.

    --
    -Styopa
    1. Re:Is it just my cynicism.... by SuricouRaven · · Score: 2

      Even if the company can be trusted, still got to get the data through NSA-tapped pipes each way. NSA with their ability to easily coerce certificate signing by any of the US-based CAs, and a policy of getting companies to insert backdoors in products. And if they really want what's in the cloud, they can just have a deniable operative use the classic bribery or extortion techniques to get access.

  10. And how can they guarantee that by mark_reh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    the NSA and other spy agencies aren't able to get at their traffic? Swiss privacy laws protect against legal attacks, not NSA attacks.

  11. Re:Speed of...light. by Runaway1956 · · Score: 2

    'Help stamp out repetitive redundancy, completely and totally.'

    That was making the rounds in the mid-70's, around the same time that T-shirts with "THINK" printed on them.

    --
    "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  12. And then you realize that by spacefight · · Score: 3, Funny

    - the swiss had their fair share of privacy desasters - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal
    - the swiss also have their intelligence services
    - the swiss also have lawful interception
    - you still need to encrypt everything as your data in transit to Switzerland might be intercepted elsewhere

    Go dark. Now.

    Regards from Switzerland

  13. Problem with Switzerland though by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 2

    ... is that it has so much foreign soil.