I wonder how much longer Switzerland can cash in on their national brand for security and privacy. Their largest banks can't even keep their customers' accounts safe from foreign tax investigators. Why would I trust the integrity of my data there?
I think you are confusing substantiated, well supported, warrants/subpoenas/etc and tax collaboration agreements, with arbitrary user requests, gag orders, mass surveillance, etc. The two are at opposite spectrums.
I'm not sure we have such a clean historical record in that area. There was a huge scandal in the 80s about massive surveillance of people on the left of the political spectrum :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_files_scandal
The big difference there was: It ended quite a few political careers when it came out, including federal minister Kopp's (since we have no real president that's actually the highest political chair). Switzerland has checks and balances in place that make it very risky for politicians to act contra the people's interests. In the US I can see no such outfall even after all the dirty business has come out - it all seems to be legal.
When implementing technology intended to provide user privacy, both fall under "attack on user privacy", and should be treated as such. Either the service has access to user data, in which case it can be arbitrarily compromised for reasons of varying "legitimacy", or the service does not have access to user data, in which case the legitimacy of the request is irrelevant.
So don't, but then when the government wants some user you have, they'll ask you to modify the code so the JS does access their data and send it back to you. Comply or shutdown.
My understanding is that in the bit mail case, the government didn't just ask for data. They also asked for code to be modified. So really, any technical solution done by coding, well, the government can just ask you to un-code it.
There's a big difference between a warrant to provide user data you trivially have access to and a demand to modify your code to intercept user data when it previously did not have that capability. I'd love to see a court case over the latter, considering that a request to insert a backdoor would require a coder to risk their entire career to comply with.
(Leaving aside that any such request would necessarily have to be a "secret warrant", which is dubious to begin with. And leaving aside mechanisms like warrant canaries, signed binaries, and Open Source clients, all of which would provide additional avenues for both detection and legal challenge.)
Antr, you gesture to "substantiated, well supported, warrants/subpoenas/etc" but fail to ask the more relevant question. Private banking enterprises within Switzerland have provided tax haven services for U.S. and European capital for many years, beginning in the post-WWI period when tax competition was minimal. The 1920s and 1930s were halcyon days for global capital fleeing the warring nations. Switzerland had a lightweight and liberal government, and banks had an appetite for alien capital when few others did.
Quoting Farquet 2012:
In a subordinate position before the war, notably with regard to the competition of France and Germany, Swiss bankers took advantage of the new international context to affirm themselves as figures of substance in the financial world at the beginning of the 1920s. Although, for example, the cumulative balance sheets of the major Swiss banks represented only 26% of those of their French counterparts in 1913, they subsequently amounted to 73% in 1929.
The Swiss financial centre was particularly renowned in the sector of cross-border wealth management. In fact, foreign capital flowed en masse towards the Swiss haven in the interwar years. According to a [League of Nations] report, owing to the importance of foreign assets, in 1929, Switzerland possessed by far the highest per capita total of bank deposits in the world. The lack of a reliable balance of payments, as much as the absence of the legal obligation for Swiss banks to publish details regarding their accounts, nevertheless prevent an exact estimate of the total amount of imported capital. Banking balance sheets indicate a general trend, but are inadequate sources.
A committee of experts working on Swiss history during World War II who, exceptionally, had access to the in-house archives of the banks, showed that holdings of securities, generally in off-balance-sheet bank custody accounts, represented, in the two biggest Swiss banks in 1931, more than three times their balance-sheet.
Needless to say, the confiscatory tax rates in the U.S. during the late 50s and 60s made going after Swiss accounts attractive. But the Swiss were having none of it.
So are the two situations you mention genuinely at opposite spectrums? Or is Switzerland's special brand the product of a persistently muscular political consensus that, after more than fifty years, may now be flagging? And if the latter is the case, then the OP asks a fair question.
German tax officials purchased stolen account information[0] in order to pursue tax cheats. If you think that's acceptable within the rule of law, then what's wrong with gag orders and mass surveillance?
The responsible server administrator who stole the data from the bank has been sentenced to prison in Switzerland and fled. The second crime was committed by the German officials, but none of both has anything to do with swiss legal standards.
No, I wasn't referring to that very case, but how OECD countries signed and agreement with Switzerland to avoid tax evasion. Just Google OECD-Swiss tax treaty. Your outlier is not the norm.
> Their largest banks can't even keep their customers' accounts safe from foreign tax investigators.
Your knowledge is outdated. The US and (to a lesser extent) the EU forced the Swiss banks to hand over all relevant data. All. Moreover, they have to pay a stiff fine ( http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/credit-suisse-set-to-... ). Remember Switzerland is a small country and not member of the EU. They have no choice but to conform.
In what way? I'm aware of the Credit Suisse conviction from this week. That case just reinforces my point that Swiss banks are unable to keep their customers' accounts safe from foreign tax officials.
I wonder how much you can trust the software if its developer must choose a favorable jurisdiction? To my knowledge, developers of Git, PGP, GPG, Bittorrent, Tor, Bitcoin and Bitmessage live where they want because the software is designed to have no centralized links to anyone's private data. So there is no big company to go after.
I think the point is that silent circle is secured by policy, not by technology. The validity of their security assertions only extend as far as you trust their word.
It's hard for anything but policy to protect against denial of service (legal attacks against the company). Even if you have technical security which prevents compromise of data, they can shut the business down.
CALEA means you are actually prevented from building/operating some kinds of privacy tech within the US (PSTN voice without wiretaps for sure, and PSTN-interconnected VOIP is a gray area; a mobile-focused VPN would be a gray area too, although not as dark as some.)
They do in that the organizations involved clearly dissociate themselves from running critical operational infrastructure, or getting involved with the potentially-illegal activities enabled by their tools.
If Tor Project ran a large number of Tor nodes directly, they'd be open to very simple legal attacks.
As a service provider you have to provide access to a fairly low percentage of data on your network under CALEA. But CALEA does not make end-to-end data protection illegal. You are not obligated to steal your customers' keys or access their endpoint equipment.
In practice, many operators do offer up access to 100% of their traffic, and to their endpoint devices to law enforcement and security agencies, but it's not a CALEA legal requirement.
Pirate bay is not Bittorrent. Bittorrent, Tor and Bitcoin are all services. But they are not centralized in hands of one person who needs to live in CH. They are distributed among thousands of small nodes which makes the entire service truly reliable. Also: each user stores the keys to his destiny vs. giving them to a single trusted party.
Silent Circle's services are designed to be 'untrusted.' Keys never leave the client. Feel free to build the client yourself, the code's on GitHub (the android clients are currently a bit easier to build than the iOS versions... ).
The problem is that the GP conflates software with services. Everything he mentioned is software/software companies, Silent Circle is a services company.
Besides, as you mention, the apps are open-source anyway.
Interesting choice. This week another "secure" email service https://protonmail.ch/ launched and their sales pitch is all about Swiss privacy protection laws. Might be a new trend.
Thank you, that looks really good. I have had a consulting business for 15 years and several customers have insisted on all email being encrypted, sometimes using Apple's email app with encryption enabled and sometimes just manually using PGP.
For just those customers who cared about protecting their IP, protonmail looks like it would be easier to use, as long as all parties used it.
There are lots of good reasons for moving your headquarters from the Caribbean to Switzerland, but "strong privacy laws" and "legendary neutrality" are not among them.
Until now their Swiss office (in the French-speaking part) is just a sales office. I wouldn't be surprised if they put a finance group there to take advantage of the low corporate taxes.
I somehow doubt they'll move their programmers there because frankly, not many non-Swiss companies that size can afford to pay Swiss IT salary rates. Plus, it's very hard to get work permits in Switzerland right now.
