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Comment by planetjones | Hacker News Reader

I also live and work in Zurich in a 'techie' job and almost everyone is happy with the new surveillance laws and powers. They are sensible, needed and have the correct number of safeguards. Why do you think they go too far?

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1.) There have been "safeguards" also at the time of the "Vichen" affair.

2.) The swiss "intelligence service" isn't famous for his intelligence. They should first do their homework on counterintelligence before anything else. Else they will just be used as a Proxy for foreign intelligence services.

I also work in Zürich. I hate this. They are interducing survailance and searches without court orders. The security of my device should be valued at least as highly as the security of my apperment.

Quite honstly, in my apparment their is nothing of interest to be found. However, my hole live is on my phone, my computer and my servers.

I would infact argue that these should have stronger protection. How anybody who supports democracy and the rule of law can agree with things like that, is quite frankly beyond me.

Where's your source for this? The enhanced surveillance can only be used if authorised by a court, the defence ministry and cabinet.

Because some people are either blind or severely minimise existing threats, often while maximising other threats

Has anybody, ever, in the history of this type of surveillance, provided concrete proof of the effectiveness thereof against the supposed threats that are used to justify it?

I don't think there is one about mass surveillance, which is not the case.

It seems the case for individual, case-by-case basis is pretty clear (though there seems to be an issue with false positives)

So your opinion is that they are good, but why? "They have the correct number of safeguards," only provides me enough information to know that you think they are good because there is a number of safeguards (what are they?) greater than 1.

My point is shouldn't the burden be on providing evidence for why they are good? Why do we need them? Why are they sensible? What was wrong before that this will fix? What can go wrong that will be prevented?

Phrasing an opinion like this, to me, raises more questions than it answers.

Yes there are three approvals needed before the enhanced surveillance can be used. Also they only expect it to be used about ten times a year. I wonder if you read the article before commenting, or just have an absolute position that anytime surveillance is mentioned you say it's bad.

The irony here is that the point of my comment is that an absolute position without any substantiation, in this case, raised more questions than it answered.

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