Proton threatens to quit Switzerland over new surveillance law
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https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehm...
Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".
Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.
These are goods things.
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.
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.
What keeps a country in check is not a constitution but a politically informed and active population. The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.
A constitution isn't just words, it creates a structure that exists in actual reality. The day before the tyrant comes you have multiple branches and levels of government. That stuff doesn't instantaneously cease to exist if they try to rip up the piece of paper, and its purpose is to fight against anyone who tries to rip it up.
If it fails at that purpose, your constitution contained insufficient checks and balances.(Notice that several of the ones in the original US constitution have been removed, and that was a mistake.)
It's like praising Danish architecture for its earthquake-resistance since no Danish building ever collapsed in an earthquake. It fails to account for the fact that Denmark never gets any significant earthquakes.
You can't tell how good a system is at resisting descent into authoritarian rule unless wannabe-autocrats have tried several times, amassed some support to achieve their goals, and the democratic institutions held against them. This never happened in Switzerland, not even in the 1930s: the ability of the Swiss constitution to precent authoritarian backsliding is untested.
(But as a side note, what you're saying is not factually correct. The Swiss constitution is from 1848, and before Napoleon only Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden would be considered nonauthorian. Many cantons, like Bern, were ruled by birthright autocratic families, and had no popular vote whatsoever.)
[1] https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-referendum-electorate-lea...
Anyway, I wasn't even trying to argue in favor of this position, or against it. I was merely replying to the parent comment that Brexit did not meet the threshold that their parent comment had suggested.
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.
Approval voting would result in “the okay-est” candidate winning rather than anyone towards an extreme winning in the primaries. Works well when there are a lot of fairly similar milquetoast candidates that split votes, like the Republican primaries of 2015.
Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.
Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.
Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.
Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.
In both systems, the correct tactic is to determine the two candidates most likely to win. Then, assign maximum score to whichever of those is better and to everyone preferable to that candidate.
It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
Because it is often correct.
Suppose there are candidates A, B and C. Candidates A and B are each polling around 6/10 and candidate C is polling around 4/10, but candidates A and B are quite similar to each other and share a base of support. According to your strategy, A and B are the two most likely to win, so if you prefer A then even though you still prefer B to C you refuse to express your preference and instead assign 10/10 to A and 1/10 to B and C. The voters who prefer candidate B do the same. The result is that A and B end each up at 3.5/10, C ends up at 4/10 and C wins. In other words, you've devolved back into first past the post and caused your least favored candidate to win because of your erroneous strategizing.
By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me. If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
> you've devolved back into first past the post
Correct. The potential for this to happen is one of the drawbacks of rated voting systems. It's also, through a different mechanism, one of the drawbacks of ranked systems. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since both alternatives give some ability to hedge against incorrect assessments.
> By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.
I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10. Both give the same odds of winning to A and B (well, mine gives B slightly higher odds because its average is 5.5 -- but you get the point). The only difference is that your method outsources the randomness to the rest of the electorate, rather than generating it yourself.
Your problem is that your voting strategy changes which two candidates are most likely to win. If everyone votes their actual preferences then it's A and B. If too many people vote according to your strategy, C becomes a frontrunner.
> You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me.
I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you. The higher that proportion is, the more likely it is that C wins instead of A or B. It doesn't have to be 100% of people to cross the threshold into changing the outcome.
> If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.
That isn't a prisoner's dilemma. A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
> I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10.
But then the voting system is receiving less information from you. Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason. Also, most people are not going to do that and requiring them to in order to express their preferences is needlessly confusing.
My strategy does not change other voters' strategies. Secret ballots prevent this type of coordination. That's my point. The collective strategy of 1/3 of the electorate does change which two candidates are most likely to win, but my individual strategy does not meaningfully do that.
> they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case. Hedging by assigning a non-maximal score increases the chance of the worst case compared to that approach, in exactly the same way that it reduces the chance of that compared to assigning a minimal score.
I'll grant that my specific tactic is predicated on a preference for achieving the best outcome rather than avoiding the worst one, but the best tactic for someone who finds avoiding the worst-case to be more important also only requires extreme votes.
> A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.
Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it. The secret ballot prevents any kind of enforced coordination. This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
> Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason.
You don't know the exact score each candidate will end up with absent your vote -- if you did, you could analytically determine a single-vote strategy that gives the best available outcome. Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression. It's just expressed in terms of the uncertainty in what the rest of the electorate is doing, not in terms of a coin flip. It does not meaningfully increase the error bars (in a large election -- say, >1k voters) because the former uncertainty quickly dwarfs the latter.
It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.
And it does because you are part of the electorate, situated the same as the others, so the strategy you devise should be the one that yields the result you want given that similarly situated people will reach the same conclusion:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
Special note for the critics of superrationality: Your vote isn't going to change the outcome, so according to classical game theory you should stay home instead of wasting your time doing something that doesn't matter. Therefore, voting at all is an exercise of superrationality. If you're not willing to use it in your voting strategy then you shouldn't use it in deciding whether to vote to begin with and so you should either use a superrational voting strategy or you should stay home.
> If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case.
You're not thinking probabilistically.
Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
Option 1, candidate A is at 4.99/10, candidate B is at 5/10, candidate C is at 4/10.
Option 2, candidate A is at 4/10, candidate B is at 4.99/10, candidate C is at 5/10.
If it's option 1 and you assigned 10/10 to candidate B, your preferred candidate loses. If it's option 2 your preferred candidate can't win and if you assign 1/10 to candidate B, your least preferred candidate wins.
But if you assign 10/10 to candidate A and 5/10 to candidate B then in option 1 that could still be enough to see candidate A win, and in option 2 it could still be enough to see candidate C lose.
Moreover, the score allows you to express how concerned you are about each outcome. If you're pretty okay with candidate B but have a moderate preference for candidate A then you can give candidate B 7/10. If candidate B is almost as bad as candidate C you can give candidate B 3/10. It allows you to hedge: How much advantage for candidate A are you willing to give up to reduce the chances of candidate C? You seem to be assuming that the only possible answers are "all of it" or "none of it", but there are other options.
> Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it.
If affects the chance of the worst-case outcome in all cases because it increases candidate C's chance against candidate B, and you don't know what the other voters are going to do. If candidate A has less support than expected due to inaccurate polling then it turns into a race between B and C regardless of whether B's supporters give A 1/10 or 5.5/10. Meanwhile you assigning a lower score to B is reducing B's chances against C regardless of why the race turns out to be between B and C.
> This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.
No it isn't. In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does. In this case, if the other party defects -- and sometimes even if they don't -- then your defection harms you, because their defection (or something else) put candidate A behind candidate C. Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
> Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression.
It has less information content. If you roll a D10 and then assign 10/10 to candidate B if it's above a 6 and 1/10 if it isn't, the voting system only gets a single bit of information from you, whereas assigning the equivalent score gives it >3 bits of information. That only matters if the election is very close, but it always only matters if the election is very close.
In 2024 there were dozens of state legislative races decided by fewer than 100 votes:
https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_State_legisl...
This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors. Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me. Frankly, I philosophically reject both of these.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality
Look, I buy superrationality from an ethical perspective. I favor the Kantian imperative as a framework (among others) for assessing ethical questions, and it's basically the same concept as superrationality.
Superrationality is not, however, a reasonable way to make practical decisions about scarce resources. The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives. In practical situations, one must deal with perverse incentives. My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
> Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:
You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1. A winning isn't an option in either of these cases, even if there is some dataset about the world that makes this set of outcomes plausible.
Maybe try thinking about it this way: In score voting, points are summed and nonrivalrous. So, a point is a point -- regardless of how many other points you gave to that candidate. Why, then, are you choosing 5/10 for B, specifically? What, analytically, leads you to that choice? If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on. If you find it more important to cause an A victory, why not choose 4/10? A point is a point, no matter how many other points the candidate got from the same voter.
> In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does.
There are formulations of the prisoner's dilemma in which a double defection is worse for both parties than a single defection is for the losing party. But it's clear that this terminology is more confusing than helpful, so I'm OK abandoning it.
> Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.
Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum. This reasoning does not argue for a vibe-based score assignment, it argues for giving the maximum score to both A and B. By assigning a lower score to either, I have already accepted some risk.
> It has less information content.
Less information on the ballot, yes, but it has the same effect on the outcome. Let's exclude cases where my vote is irrelevant. I have ten options, and nine of them are potential numbers of additional points that a candidate needs to win. Each of those numbers are roughly equally likely, because they are the least significant bits (least significant bits in stochastic processes tend to approximate a uniform distribution).
If I give 1 point, the candidate wins 0/9 times. If I give 10 points, the candidate wins 9/9 times. If I give 5 points, the candidate wins if the number of additional points needed is 2-5 (1 would make my vote irrelevant), and loses if it's 6-10. So, the effect on the outcome is the same as if I gave 10 points 4/9 times.
The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging. There are legitimate non-mistake reasons to do that.
> Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me.
You're not trying to get them to copy you, you're trying to devise a strategy that maximizes your advantage in the event that other people in exactly the same situation as you come to the same conclusion. In other words, knowing that people using the same reasoning as you will copy you, what reasoning do you choose to use?
> The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives.
It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.
Or to consider it another way, think of it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. You sure you want to make "defect" your first move when the aggregate outcome will be public and there will be future elections?
> My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).
Voting is a perverse incentive for you. It takes time to cast a vote, the chances of it determining the outcome are entirely negligible and so is any notion that the candidates will know, much less change their behavior, based on whether you as an individual cast a vote. It's why so many people stay home, and everyone who doesn't is spending their own time to do otherwise because they altruistically prefer that the system work than that they save the time it takes them to do something that yields no personal benefit.
> You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1.
You're ignoring the probabilistic part. It's not scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the same time. You don't know if it's scenario 1 or scenario 2, that's the thing that's indeterminate, and you have to fill out your ballot not knowing that. Then if you assign 10/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 1, you've given the election to B over A. But if you assign 1/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 2, you've given the election to C over B. Neither of those are in your interest, so you have the personal incentive to reduce their probabilities by assigning candidate B a score in the middle of the range.
> If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on.
Because that's a trade off. There is no single "most important value". You want both for A to score higher than B and for B to score higher than C. Assigning a lower score to B makes one of the things you want more likely and the other one less likely. If you judge them to be equally important and equally probable then you should assign B a score in the middle to hedge your bets. If you judge one to be more important or more likely then you should weight the score in proportion to how much of your vote you're willing to spend to make one possibility more likely at the expense of the other. Assigning the maximal or minimal score assumes that you prioritize one thing entirely at the expense of the other. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.
> Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum.
Except that you're trading each of those increments against the probability of the other thing you want.
> The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.
But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
Also, what benefit is being achieved by forcing ordinary voters to choose their vote using random number generation instead of simply allowing them to write down the number they would have used as the threshold?
"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.
> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.
Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.
So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.
> There is no single "most important value".
You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.
> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?
It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.
1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.
https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6
2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game. https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.
I don't think that says what you're claiming it does. If you actually look at the simulation linked from there (which I do take some issues with, but those are irrelevant to the point):
- Scaled sincerity, the one that gets their claimed 91% effectiveness, is actually one of the more mathematically complicated strategies to execute.
- Maxing + sincerity, the version of "mildly-optimized sincerity" that is least complicated to execute (and thus the one most likely to be executed intuitively), is among the least effective in large elections.
- Mean-based thresholding -- the closest approximation of my proposed strategies here, consistently outperforms all sincere-derived approaches in elections of 10+ participants. It is also simpler to execute than scaled sincerity.
> and that leads to a greater NET utility
This is not accounting for the reduced utility of increasing the complexity of the voting system, or of weakening the secret ballot by allowing more information content on it.
The latter is the real argument against score voting that I don't think has a counter. I haven't brought it up yet, because it's a lot less convincing if you believe that optimal individual strategy in score voting performs much better than optimal individual strategy in approval voting. But you, in particular, don't seem to believe that. So...
Score voting puts more information on the ballot than any other system, for an only marginal improvement over approval voting (which puts the second-least, after single vote). Putting more information on the ballot is bad, because it allows votes to be dis-aggregated. Attack description:
- Alice instructs Bob to fill out the ballot in a specific way. That specific way includes minor random perturbations of scores that are unlikely to influence the election result, but are likely to make Bob's ballot unique. E.g. selecting a random score for a candidate with a very low chance of victory, fully randomizing a question that Alice does not care about, or (worst case) adding or subtracting 1-5 percent from scores of relevant candidates.
- Alice observes the vote counting, and notes if Bob's ballot was observed.
- Alice rewards or punishes Bob accordingly
The value of the secret ballot is very high. I suggest that it is greater than any increase in utility achievable in the delta between score voting and approval voting.
of course it does. this is basic game theory. but the point is, at some level of iterating on what other voters will do, you arrive at an effectively static "wave function" of possibilities, so you can behave as if you have constant fixed win probabilities for the other candidates, and vote accordingly.
just use VSE results.
http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6
https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes
> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?
it would help you to spend at least 30 seconds researching a complex field like voting methods before asking a deeply misguided question like this.
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.
Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.
That system works and has worked for a long time.
I guess you could work in soup kitchens, but that’s horribly inefficient welfare compared to just electing competent leadership, if the ultimate aim is to benefit The People.
It’s more putting the burden on the people
By free labor I meant the bureaucrats who are paid in the otherwise to make the laws
I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?
[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.
Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.
I like the sound of the upside a lot though.
Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.
I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).
Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).
Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.
Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.
Functionally this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen with no hope of amendment really ever again.
I’m not sure if that’s worse than 3/4 states since the Netherlands isn’t so politically localized.
Would note that this is a very modern phenomenon, with Nixon having considered pushing for abolishing the electoral college in the 70s.
https://www.denederlandsegrondwet.nl/id/vlxuov0ja0xh/grondwe...
Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.
This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.
People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has. As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.
What a bunch of performative nonsense on their behalf.
If you architect your infrastructure around non-retention, even a temporarily defeated law signals it’s time to future-proof elsewhere.
Anyone can suggest a law. The stage this one failed in is explicitly meant to gauge if there would be any reasonable support to get it passed. The answer was a resounding No.
Even if it proceeded, it would have quite likely lead to a popular referendum due to Switzerland's system of direct democracy. I'd say not many places in the world have as strong defenses against laws like this as Switzerland.
Of course, it doesn't mean that it's not important to highlight when such ideas do crop up, and especially naming and shaming who/where they come from. I'm glad Proton et al. spoke out.
If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.
I'm currently paying for proton mail, but I'll be migrating away for it once my current period expires, exactly because it's not full-featured.
It has the worst search I have ever seen in a mail client. Even after enabling content search it's as good as utterly useless.
Entshittification continues...
Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.
They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal
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.
Take Belgium, which took the "mass surveillance by default is illegal" and introduced a law that forced mass surveillance in areas that exceeded a certain legal threshold, designed specifically to include every single town in Belgium except for some tiny town where almost nobody lives.
Other European countries have applied similar workarounds. They're all pretty much dead the moment they hit the courts, but as long as the public doesn't know and nobody bothers to start a lawsuit, the mass surveillance continues.
"Data retention", as the industry calls it, is still active far and wide across Europe. Some countries retain said data for days at most, others for years.
Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Claiming that 100,000,000+ are aligned to a party platform is much more crazy.
Any party is much less likely to have a dominance, and they'd have to play along with the others to form a coalition.
I'd argue that this is much more what a democracy should be like and much more representative of the wide range of people and voices that our countries (Norway, Netherlands, etc) have compared to the "divide-in-the-middle" politics that are common to the US.
It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.
To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".
It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.
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.
The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.
I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.
Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.
Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.
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.
by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.
The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe destroying one satellite would destroy them all.
Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.
The anti-satellite side has a budget hundreds to thousands of times cheaper, based on average ball bearings to satellite density in orbit, with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.
Approximately as much as a finished satellite or block or gold of similar mass. The bulk of the cost is in launch and aiming.
There are 40,000 SUVs randomly located on the planet.
You fire randomly in the horizontal plane.
What's the probability of you hitting an SUV, and not yourself in the back 84 minutes later?
The earth is big. The probability isn't zero, but for any given orbits period it is low. And both the ball bearings and the satelites will re-enter after a while.
Why randomly, if you're aiming for objects in an known orbit?
> with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.
If you miss one — and you probably will without active guidance, imagine aiming said gun at an SUV seven time zones away — everything's in a different place by your next close approach. Your ball bearings and the target both, thanks to chaotic pertubations, boosts, drag, etc.
What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)
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 Vüpf 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?
> how can e-mail ever be a secure medium
Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.
I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.
Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the content of your emails, there wouldn't be much point to Gmail.
Microsoft mostly cares about enterprises, and enterprises generally don't want E2EE email; they have legal requirements to retain e-mail of employees, and have their own reasons to want to be able to access employee emails sometimes.
Apple... I don't know where they stand on this.
Protonmail is not standards compilant. You can't login to your protonmail account from Thunderbird or k9 mail. Yes, they have an IMAP bridge, but it's proprietary / requires a paid account. Thus you're locked in to the official protonmail clients
https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge
I'm not too familiar with it, but we're building Marco (https://marcoapp.io) and a customer just showed it to me recently.
> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.
See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."
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.
Go where? See "Weakening encryption would make European security worse" – the VPN industry reacts to the EU's plan for end-to-end encryption backdoors"
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/weakening...
Exactly. Were the fear mongers and authoritarians so successful that the infected organism starts acting against its own wellbeing?