Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Privacy EU Google Microsoft Security United States Apple

Can Switzerland Become a Safe Haven For the World's Data? (dailydot.com) 103

Posted by msmash from the seems-like-a-good-idea dept.
An anonymous reader shares an interesting article on Daily Dot which lists a number of reasons why Switzerland should be deemed as the nation for storing all of your data. The article reads: As United States and European Union regulators debate a sweeping new data-privacy agreement, Switzerland is presenting itself as a viable neutral location for storing the world's data thanks to strict privacy laws and ideal infrastructure. The Swiss constitution guarantees data privacy under Article 13. The country's laws protecting privacy are similar to those enacted by the E.U. Swiss data protections are also, in some cases, much stricter than those of the E.U., according to Nicola Benz, attorney at Swiss law firm Froriep. And since Switzerland is not part of the E.U., data stored there remains outside the reach of the union's authorities. [...] The country's tight privacy laws could make the small nation more attractive to privacy-focused start-ups. And it already has that momentum. After the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden 2013 revelations about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance activities, Switzerland witnessed something of a boom in its data-center business. Phil Zimmermann, creator of the popular PGP encryption protocol and founder of Silent Circle, even left the U.S. for Switzerland last year, citing the overreach of American authorities. Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss-based encrypted email service Protonmail, said that the country has robust processes in how it carries out data requests from authorities. Data requests have to go through a court like in most countries, said Yen, but "the person that's having their data requested needs to be notified eventually about the request happening and there's an opportunity to fight it in an open court. This is quite different than the U.S., where things can go through a so-called FISA court."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Can Switzerland Become a Safe Haven For the World's Data? More

Can Switzerland Become a Safe Haven For the World's Data?

Comments Filter:

  • Yes, that's why the Nazi's hid their wealth there (Score:4, Informative)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @01:34PM (#51949757)
    Everyone has been hiding money and information there for years. Everyone from the Nazi's to the Russians to FIFA.

  • Like the Jewish assets during WW2? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @01:51PM (#51949947)

    The Swiss didn't seem to have any issue turning over Jewish gold and bank accounts during their Nazi alliance. How sure can we be a "friendly state" doesn't secretly get the data anyway? The Swiss bankers didn't get rich by simply holding assets, they go with whatever the highest bidder wants.

    Good encryption is the only way to keep your data safe, in Switzerland or elsewhere.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hentes ( 2461350 )

      What if good encryption is outlawed in places other than Switzerland? I wish I was being paranoid.

      • It won't matter if good encryption is outlawed everywhere but Switzerland, you won't be able to send or receive your encrypted data without it being at risk or break the law.

    • Re: Like the Jewish assets during WW2? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @02:59PM (#51950647)

      There was no nazi alliance. Hitler hated Switzerland and took it as a personal offense that they wouldn't join the German-speaking alliance with Austria. Switzerland fully expected to be attacked by the Germany and developed a defense plan where the military and some of the population would retreat to the mountains (the redoubt) where they would provide arms to the rebels in the cities while also attacking in raids.

      Both times the Germans realized it would be pointless to invade - even if they took the cities on the plains they would never take the mountains, and the Swiss population, highly armed, would constantly be attacking them.

      And for the Swiss banks, they provided a much-needed service to the Jews in Germany to move their money out of Germany. If you're American you may think about the same, living in a corrupt country like you do. Unfortunately the Nazis killed most of the Swiss customers and they're still dealing with repatriating the money. Of course they can't just give it to anyone that claims it.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by athmanb ( 100367 )
      Swiss misbehaviour regarding Jews during WW2 consisted of:
      - Accepting confiscated jewish assets (art, jewelry) in payment for goods even when the government had been informed that "legal" proceedings leading to those forfeitures didn't even have a semblance of fairness.
      - Liquidating jewish bank accounts whose owners did not contact the bank anymore after the war without taking even very reasonable measures of trying to reach any heirs.

      There are some common other urban legends going around like the Swiss

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "Didn't seem to have any issue" - that might have applied to a bunch of Nazi-leaning bankers, I guess? But the swiss government and a lot of other people -including bankers- clearly saw a lot of issues even prior to the war. For example, seeing the Nazis suppressing their political enemies was why banking secrecy laws was passed in 1934, prior to the war.

      Now, ultimately, adherence to banking secrecy was not good during WW2. Switzerland made concessions to the Nazis, and people suffered for it. But you shoul

  • Neuromancer for the win; we now just need an orbiting, privately funded space station.

  • The Swiss do have a FISA-like court (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    The Swiss do have a FISA-like court and a robust intelligence capability. But, unlike the U.S. FISA court, which is spelled out in open legislation, the Swiss do not make public their system. In other words, it's worse, because the intelligence agencies have broader and less-scrutinized authorities, but only less advertised. If a foreigner hosts data on a Swiss system and Swiss intelligence wants access to it, then they have means of targeting that system, and are not accountable to their courts for thos

  • I'm not so sure. The Swiss also had strong protections and privacy laws regarding bank accounts but look what happened to those when the IRS wanted the data on US citizens.

  • I'm still waiting for Mitt Romney to explain how his IRA account can have $100M in it when legal contribution limits is ~$200,000 over 40 years.
    • >> I'm still waiting for Mitt Romney to explain how his IRA account can have $100M in it when legal contribution limits is ~$200,000 over 40 years.

      Seriously? If it's really affecting your mental health, please read this article:
      http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-07-15/the-secret-behind-romney-s-magical-ira
      (TLDR: you can inflate your IRA by moving low-valued assets into it to get under the limits; Romney was essentially accused of undervaluing the assets he moved into his IRA)

      You should also Go

      • Re:Don't forget the Cayman Islands... (Score:4, Informative)

        by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @02:58PM (#51950637)

        If it's really affecting your mental health, please read this article:

        Mitt Romney had an obligation as a presidential candidate to explain why he had an unusually large retirement account and release his tax returns. He didn't, danced around the issue and played the victim when the media ran stories.

        You should also Google "SEP IRA limits" - that's the plan that small business owners use to contribute (and deduct) up to about $50K year.

        Most business owners don't set up SEP IRAs in the Cayman Islands. Unless, of course, they have something to hide from the IRS or the general public.

  • I'm sure the Swizz will create an awesome bunch of rules explaining in precise detail how they will promise to maintain your data private.

    Execution, however, is a different matter as it is not the swiss who have built our operating systems and neither is it likely they could even do it in a secure way.

    So it's a non-starter.

  • All it takes is an unwavering belief that the organs of state security do not see themselves as clear-thinking Defenders of the Faith, and have not placed themselves and their actions above the orders and rules of mere elected officials.

  • No. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Next question?

  • Store data on the cloud like RAID (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @02:48PM (#51950511)
    So for example if you have data servers in 8 countries, you encrypt and break your data up into 5 chunks. Create 3 additional parity chunks, and store one chunk in each country. To access the original data, you need to pull data from 5 of the 8 servers (the 3 parity chunks allow you to access your data even if access to your servers in up to 3 of those countries goes down).

    Any individual country's government can hack, install backdoors on, or confiscate your servers in that country, and it won't help them read your data. In order to get a readable copy of your data, they need to pull the data from at least 5 of your servers in different countries, and have your decryption key. There's no need to pick a single country and hope that it is/remains neutral and friendly to your data.

    • Re: Store data on the cloud like RAID (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They don't need to confiscate your data. They only have to confiscate YOU. Then you either surrender the keys or go to prison. After 25 years they ask you again. Encryption is useless. Technology cannot prevail against the State once the gloves come off.

    • Stormy clouds (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This idea is similar to "Stormy Clouds", with the addition that on an information-theoretical basis, maximal distance separation codes can provide more entropy that traditional symmetric encryption: [paper [ieee.org]] [presentation [youtube.com]]

  • ProtonMail (Score:5, Informative)

    by GbrDead ( 702506 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @02:57PM (#51950613)

    Actually, ProtonMail sucks a lot. It's "security" is based on two passwords: one for login, one for decrypting the mailbox.
    1. Both of the passwords were sent to their server upon registration. I have no guarantees that they were not stored in clear text.
    2. I have no guarantees that the mailbox is even encrypted.
    3. Even if the mailbox is encrypted and they haven't stored its password, a totalitarian government may force them to install a man-in-the-middle and have my messages the moment I access them (i.e. send the password).
    4. No PKI. No interoperability with PGP/MIME or S/MIME. Totally proprietary. If I send an e-mail message to a non-ProtonMail address I must somehow communicate a password for it as well. How? Not ProtonMail's problem.

    In short, ProtonMail provides something that is not an end-to-end e-mail encryption and thus not useful at all. You can do much better by using even GMail (via SMTP and IMAP/POP3) with ThunderBird and Enigmail (a PGP/MIME extension). Google will only ever see the encrypted messages. Only using a desktop client guarantees that your private key will never be sent to a man-in-the-middle (e.g. GMail, ProtonMail).

  • Maybe not Switzerland, but the trend since the Snowden revelations has been to move data back to Europe from the US. European companies have been dropping hosting and networking companies In the America and it's estimated Cisco has lost around 30 billion in sales. Who knows how much hosting companies like Amazon have lost. So, European companies and subsidiaries are moving their data back to their home countries. There hasn't been a Snowden-level event yet in the countries to force the companies to think a
    • You must be kidding. AWS and Azure revenue is going through the roof. Ciscos revenue is at an all time high.
  • I keep my odd-numbered bits in Switzerland, and the even-numbered ones in the Cayman Islands. Can't be too careful these days.
  • Switzerland has enabled crime for many decades with the supposed privacy laws. The stash of Nazi wealth in Switzerland and a refusal to help return property stolen from the Jews leaps to mind as well as enabling tax evasion for US citizens. So just how can we have privacy and still prevent financial crimes as well as terrorist activities? Perhaps a partial solution would be to allow businesses far less privacy than we allow the public.

  • Iceland would be better (Score:3)

    by seoras ( 147590 ) on Wednesday April 20, 2016 @07:44PM (#51952581)

    I was asked by the ex-CEO of Mega (not Dotcom) for suggestions for non-hostile data centres about a 18 month ago.
    We'd met casually and he was talking about the risks of raids, neutrality etc and was soliciting ideas.
    I suggested Iceland for a number of good reasons.
    1) Geo-physical location. Right in the middle of the atlantic at the mid-point between Europe and N.America. Good latency to either continent.
    2) Political neutrality. Iceland jails bankers and politicians. Not whistle blowers and has been a Wikileaks save haven.
    3) Abundance, even surplus, of renewable energy. Cooling isn't a problem either :)

  • I think Mars is better

Slashdot Top Deals

No spitting on the Bus! Thank you, The Mgt.

Close