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The bill did not pass in the first stage of the law making process as all the parties rejected it. Also, I'm very confident that even if it passed the first few hurdles, someone would make an initiative against it and that initiative would win 9 out of 10 times as most Bünzlis are privacy minded people and would feel like their freedoms are being taken away by such a law.
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The Federal Council's plans to reform the monitoring of postal and telecommunications traffic have been rejected in the consultation process: All the major parties that have expressed an opinion on the matter reject the plan.
In their statements, the Greens, SP, Green Liberals, FDP and SVP speak of endangered data protection, a threat to Switzerland as a location for innovation, disproportionate interference by the state and unclear effects of the planned changes to the ordinance.
The Green Liberals and the FDP also see the planned changes as contradictory to current law. The Center Party declined to comment. Organizations such as the Swiss Digital Society and companies such as the Swiss messenger service Threema have also criticized the plans.
The Federal Council sent the partial revisions of two implementing decrees out for consultation at the end of January. This ended on Tuesday. According to the Federal Council, this involves a "clear definition of the categories of cooperation obligations" for providers of communication services, for example in the case of surveillance authorized by the authorities as part of criminal proceedings.
This primarily affects traditional telecommunications services such as Swisscom, Sunrise and Salt, but also service providers that provide communication services without their own infrastructure, such as messaging, VoIP, VPN, cloud or email services such as Whatsapp, Threema, Protonmail or Skype.
With the revision, the latter are to be divided into three new groups with different obligations, depending on the number of users and turnover. According to the federal government, this is intended to achieve a "more balanced gradation of obligations".
Confederation plans to introduce new types of information and monitoring According to the Greens, companies that provide a service for 5,000 users would now have to be able to identify the latter by storing their IP address. Companies with more than one million users would be obliged to store marginal data such as the geolocation of customers for six months.
This "vastly expanded data retention" would make it impossible to operate secure messenger or email services and would be a "massive intrusion" into privacy. For the SVP, the new definition of obligations "obviously has the potential" to burden a number of SMEs instead of relieving them.
The federal government also plans to introduce new types of information and surveillance. It writes that the two revisions to the ordinances basically provide for the obligation to remove encryption. However, end-to-end encryption such as messenger services are exempt from this.
On Swiss television's "Tagesschau" program, Jean-Louis Biberstein, deputy head of the Federal Postal and Telecommunications Surveillance Service, recently said that the requirements for service providers would not be tightened. They would be clarified.
After the revision, a company like Threema would have the same obligations as before. Threema contradicts this in a statement sent to various media at the end of April. The revision of the VÜPF would force the company to abandon the principle of "collecting only as little data as technically necessary".
The Swiss internet service provider Proton also wrote to the news agency Keystone-SDA on request that the Federal Council's proposals would "massively expand" state surveillance. In its statement, the association "Digitale Gesellschaft Schweiz" speaks of a "serious attack on fundamental rights, SMEs and the rule of law".
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
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That's the translation from the article.
