Open Letter: Civil society concerned about extensive and indiscriminate data retention regime in Switzerland

Revised Swiss Ordinance would impose mass surveillance

The Swiss government wants to expand online surveillance by revising the Swiss Ordinance on the Surveillance of Post and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF). The proposed Ordinance would massively increase the amount of personal data retained from users through the obligation of metadata retention for large communications service providers, and user identification requirements on virtually all service providers. Online services will have to store this data for at least six months and help law enforcement decrypt the content. Such levels of surveillance are unacceptable in a democratic society and seriously interfere with people’s rights to privacy and data protection.

Today, 19 civil society organisations, including EDRi, are urging the Swiss Federal Councilor to make changes to the proposed Ordinance. The current proposal:

• Violates people’s fundamental rights to privacy and data protection
• Has a chilling effect on people exercising other rights, like freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of assembly and association
• Is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)
• Poses a risk to Switzerland’s adequacy status with the EU
• Creates huge cybersecurity risks for users, endangering their sensitive data
• Doesn’t compare to other less intrusive alternative measures that wouldn’t subject the entire population to mass surveillance

Civil society calls on the Federal Councilor to abandon any proposals for wide-ranging, blanket data retention obligations, privacy-effacing identification obligations, weakening of crucial legal safeguards and automatic data disclosures in the revision of the VÜPF Ordinance. They recommend instead to align the Swiss legislation with the highest standards of protection set by both the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights.