For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom

Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by pilif on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @09:34AM (#8202219)

If you trust a provider from Switzerland, be mindful that you also trust the Swiss state: Since 2002 all communication providers are forced to keep a log of all communication flowing over their pipes and hand that out to the authorities on request. Reading the law, I think this isn't just metadata (which would be bad enough) but actual data too. Also, data needs to be kept for up to 30 years.

Now granted, our authorities are way less heavy handed in their approach than the various US agencies, but still, if you don't trust the Swiss government (btw: lately not willing to stand up to US demands), you should not, by any means trust any Swiss company to handle data for you.

If you read german, here's the law: http://www.ejpd.admin.ch/content/dam/data/sicherheit/gesetzg...

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Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by fla on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @09:52AM (#8202286)

One should also know that the Swiss government has always been collaborating with the US agencies. We even have our own Echelon [1]. Don't trust anyone, crypt your data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onyx_(interception_system)

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Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by secfirstmd on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @01:58PM (#8203527)

NSA/Swiss Cooperation for years

NSA Backdoors in Crypto AG Ciphering Machines https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/nsa_backdoors...

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Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by _delirium on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @11:50AM (#8202840)

Huh, permanent full-data logging seems pretty onerous even just from a technical perspective. Does a cloud provider like Exoscale really have to keep a copy of everything that ever touches their cloud? That'd be some pretty massive data warehousing.

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Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by pyre on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @12:19PM (#8202969)

Don't worry. The government is working on building a warehouse to alleviate them of that burden. They'll just forward all data to the government-run data warehouse. Free of charge! ;-)

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Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by pyritschard on Thursday August 21, 2014 @09:46AM (#8207291)

This applies to "communications provider" which right now means telcos. Infrastructure providers such as exoscale of course do no such thing.

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Re:For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom by tomjen3 on Wednesday August 20, 2014 @11:28AM (#8202723)

Wouldn't that be totally pointless if the data is encrypted in transit or does this also extend to other types of businesses that are not ISPs?

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