Como respuesta a los atentados en Francia en 2015, el gobierno suizo ha propuesto una ley de seguridad nacional en internet que pretende supervisar el tráfico dentro de sus fronteras y vincular la privacidad individual en la red a los intereses de seguridad nacional.
Esto afectaría a muchos servicios de seguridad que se ofrecen en ese país y que tienen clientela de todo el mundo. El hecho de que Suiza no esté sometida a jueces estadounidenses o europeos hace muy atractivo cualquier servicio de almacenamiento o seguridad informática de ese país. Esa ventaja quedaría desmantelada con esta ley intervencionista.
Diferentes movimientos suizos lanzaron hace unos meses una campaña de recopilación de firmas para forzar una votación popular sobre la ley prevista. Recordar que Suiza tiene una “democracia participativa” (en España tenemos “democracia representativa”) que permite votar cualquier asunto vía referendum si la población muestra interés vía cierta cantidad de firmas.
Para esta causa se necesitaban 50.000 firmas. El movimiento consiguió 70.000 y el estado dió por válidas 55.000, por lo que hay vía libre para una consulta popular sobre la ley propuesta.
We are happy to announce that, due to the efforts of our users and allies, the Swiss Surveillance Law will be put to a vote by the Swiss people!
In September last year, the Swiss parliament passed a new surveillance law known as the Nachrichtendienstgesetzt (NDG) or la Loi sur le renseignement (Lrens). The law would have severely curtained privacy rights in Switzerland. Due to our use of end-to-end encryption, the ProtonMail secure email service would not be negatively impacted by the new law. However, we strongly believe in protecting privacy rights, so together with other opposition groups, we decided to mount a challenge against the new law. Due to Switzerland’s unique system of direct democracy, any law can be challenged by collecting 50’000 signatures within a period of 3 months after the passage of the law.
Today, we are happy to announce that this effort has succeeded and this afternoon at 13:30h, the referendum will be officially presented to the Swiss government in Bern. This means at the next election, the Swiss surveillance law will be put to a public vote by the entire country, and for once, the people and not politicians will decide the future of privacy in Switzerland. We would like to use this historic occasion to thank the numerous Swiss ProtonMail users who assisted in this effort.
The signature campaign started in September and ran until the end of December. By the first week of December, the campaign only collected around 20’000 signatures and the outcome was very much in doubt. It was at this time that we decided to call upon our community for support and we sent an email to all Swiss ProtonMail users (identified by .ch email addresses). The Swiss ProtonMail community is small (we estimate 30’000 users), but quickly mobilized to help collect signatures.
The result is that over 70’000 signatures were mailed in (the collection center stopped counting after 70’000), of which 64’500 were processed, and by Tuesday evening, over 55’000 of those signatures had been certified, meeting the statutory threshold. We are thankful that so many of our community decided to support this effort and we appreciate the many emails of encouragement that we received.
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https://protonmail.com/blog/swiss-surveillance-law-referendum/
