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This law change died in the "Vernehmlassung" which is early in the process. It's dead with opposition from all sides of the political spectrum. It had no chance.

https://www.inside-it.ch/vupf-revision-faellt-in-der-vernehm...

Even if the revision is 'dead' now, the precedent is set: the Swiss government’s willingness to consider gutting core privacy protections rewrites the risk calculation for every privacy-focused provider headquartered there.

If you architect your infrastructure around non-retention, even a temporarily defeated law signals it’s time to future-proof elsewhere.

There is no precedent here. There are politicians advocating for this kind of stuff everywhere, that doesn't indicate the likelihood of a law like this passing.

Anyone can suggest a law. The stage this one failed in is explicitly meant to gauge if there would be any reasonable support to get it passed. The answer was a resounding No.

Even if it proceeded, it would have quite likely lead to a popular referendum due to Switzerland's system of direct democracy. I'd say not many places in the world have as strong defenses against laws like this as Switzerland.

Of course, it doesn't mean that it's not important to highlight when such ideas do crop up, and especially naming and shaming who/where they come from. I'm glad Proton et al. spoke out.

I will say that the last few people’s votes on this didn’t go our way, e.g. “Vorratsdatenspeicherung”, storing telecommunications data for the case of an injunction. It’s always easy to use FUD to get people to give up some rights they think aren’t important.

Yeah, I hope that as well.

Th government will just try and try again with "softer" version of the law until they get what they want even if it is 10-20 years from now. I am not surprise government justify it something along the line of "think of the children".

It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.

The law can't bind future lawmakers. That's a common feature of every legal system.

Any legal system can pass a law saying "we revoke this previous law".

This is what constitutions are for. When you have the support, you install a constitutional protection that says the government can't do this. Repealing the protection requires the same super-majority needed to pass it, so changing the law isn't just a matter of the tyrants needing to get back to 51% from 49%, they have to get from 33% to 67%.

Then you layer these protections against multiple levels of government so they'd all have to be repealed together by separate legislatures before the government is allowed to do it, discouraging the attempt.

Hah, I was going to say that sounded needlessly heavy handed.

Then I checked what the Netherlands does and found that changing the constitution doesn’t merely require you to get a majority, it also requires you to survive at least one election and keep that (super)majority before you can even begin.

Even that sounds easy compared to my country. In Australia a constitutional change requires a referendum, with a double majority condition to pass. Specifically it requires the vote in over half the states to be in favour, in addition to the overall national vote in favour.

That described Dutch system also sounds relatively easy compared to the US model, which requires 2/3 votes in each chamber of Congress (meaning the people-based one and the land-based one), *then* 3/4 of the states (so another land-based check) have to ratify it.

Functionally this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen with no hope of amendment really ever again.

> this means that in the modern political climate, the US Constitution is fully frozen

Would note that this is a very modern phenomenon, with Nixon having considered pushing for abolishing the electoral college in the 70s.

Yeah, I wasn’t clear enough. The first vote (before the election) requires a simple majority vote. The second vote (after the election) requires a 2/3 in favor vote in both houses.

I’m not sure if that’s worse than 3/4 states since the Netherlands isn’t so politically localized.

Also note that The Netherlands frequently does constitution changes, even with that complexity. Our current version for example dates from 2022, when (among other changes) the secrecy of correspondence was amended to include all telecommunication, as it only included communication of letter, phone, and telegraph before that.

https://www.denederlandsegrondwet.nl/id/vlxuov0ja0xh/grondwe...

Please reboot your government for the changes to take effect.

I'd argue that this is unnecessary in Switzerland due to the existing referendum system.

After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.

The way authoritarianism work is they pick some enemy to rally against and convince people that the ends of stopping that evil justify the means of becoming evil. The problem with this is that it can garner 51% support within the population for temporary periods of time, so you need a system that can prevent it even in that environment. This typically means that violations of fundamental rights should require significantly more than 51% popular support or require changes in public sentiment to stick for a period of time before they can make foundational changes (e.g. only a third of the US Senate being up for election every two years).

> After the government passes a new law, opponents have 100 days to collect 50000 signatures. If they manage, the law will not take force until it's approved by a vote by the populace.

I generally hate ballot propositions within the context of California (or American States really, but I put my energy towards the State I actually live in and care the most about), but that's an interesting way to do it. Have there been any significant downsides to this specific clause[1] in Switzerland?

[1] Let me emphasize: "this specific clause" being the one I quoted. I'm not looking for a general discussion on all forms of ballot propositions whether pro or anti.

Downside: Sometimes laws can be delayed for 1+ years due to a referendum. The political process is slower and big reforms are much harder.

Upside: Lawmakers need to write balanced laws or they face threats of referendum signature collection from other parties or civil organizations. Often in political discussions you hear that "position X won't stand a chance in a referendum". That is a good thing.

Further additions to your comment. Expanding on your downside: Big reforms like giving women the right to vote only took effect in 1971 on the federal level. On a cantonal level, Appenzell-Innerhoden had to be forced into it in the 90s by the Tribunal Federal, but well.

I'd add some advantages to the upside as well: some changes require a referendum, such as changes to the constitution. But there's more: a popular initiative can be launched and if you collect 100,000 signatures in 18 months, you can force a vote on your own law. This is most commonly done by political parties and adjacent organisations, so it is at least feasible that a privacy-conscious organisation could launch an initiative to make it illegal to store any kind of user-identifying data. It is even possible private citizens could do it. There would likely be a "contre-projet" arguing why this isn't a good idea, but there is often a for/against for any initiative or referendum and they get to present their views in detail (in paper booklets, the vote swiss app, and on the federal chancellery website).

Further upsides: unlike US/British/some other countries, nobody has a 50% voting block in the Swiss parliament and it has remained a coalition since the modern iteration of the country (since 1848).

Basically Swiss politics is extremely deliberative. I honestly think "we will quit Switzerland if they do this!" is a bit of a hyperbolic reaction.

Ah, so the referendum isn’t then scheduled for a date in short order if the requisite signatures are collected but held at the next regularly scheduled election? Fair enough.

I like the sound of the upside a lot though.

Yes, except that the "votations" happen 4x per year. Here are all the next ones: https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/f/pore/va/vab_1_3_3_1.html

Each will have 1-4 issues (approx) scheduled. Elections for politicians happen every 5 years, but no need to wait for those. What takes time (for votations) is the process: you have to verify the signatures once they're handed in at the federal chancellery and then decide when to schedule it.

Or if there was a law clarifying not to tread on privacy if that’s what the population has latest indicated, this kind of effort wouldn’t always need yo be wasted.

Asking the unpaid population to put in free labour all the time seems like a deterrent.

Democracy is fundamentally about putting in free labour. That’s just how it works, from the lowliest municipal elections up to federal. It’s a lot of unpaid labour.

That system works and has worked for a long time.

I think that’s an oversimplification. You can’t take the “free labor of performing democracy” and put it to equally good use doing anything else I can think of.

I guess you could work in soup kitchens, but that’s horribly inefficient welfare compared to just electing competent leadership, if the ultimate aim is to benefit The People.

Agreed on oversimplification

It’s more putting the burden on the people

By free labor I meant the bureaucrats who are paid in the otherwise to make the laws

[dead]

In Switzerland you can change the constitution with popular votes. That only requires for 50% of the voters to agree and half of the cantons.

Then get half the voters to agree to make it two thirds. After you put the other protections in, naturally.

You’re arguing for massive changes to a very unique country with the oldest democracy in Europe. Unless you’re Swiss, or have credentials related to Swiss law, I don’t think you’re arguing anything realistic.

Countries can be as unique as they want to be, but they still need a system for preventing authoritarianism. The existing system is fine if it's effective and not fine if it isn't.

Switzerland has been preventing authoritarianism since before it was cool. Like, for 700 years. (With a brief interruption when they were invaded and overthrown by Napoleon.) So their system for the first 600 of those 700 years was the best system for preventing authoritarianism; a lot of it survives today.

This would be a wrong argument even if your premise about Switzetland was factually true (it's not).

It's like praising Danish architecture for its earthquake-resistance since no Danish building ever collapsed in an earthquake. It fails to account for the fact that Denmark never gets any significant earthquakes.

You can't tell how good a system is at resisting descent into authoritarian rule unless wannabe-autocrats have tried several times, amassed some support to achieve their goals, and the democratic institutions held against them. This never happened in Switzerland, not even in the 1930s: the ability of the Swiss constitution to precent authoritarian backsliding is untested.

(But as a side note, what you're saying is not factually correct. The Swiss constitution is from 1848, and before Napoleon only Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden would be considered nonauthorian. Many cantons, like Bern, were ruled by birthright autocratic families, and had no popular vote whatsoever.)

I'm sorry I haven't answered your comment so far, because, even though it is mistaken in many ways, it seems to be in good faith, and I think it deserves an answer.

Switzerland also has amassed hundreds of constitutional amendments over that time. So perhaps the ability to frequently pass amendments has been instrumental to their success, and they should be on the lookout for new opportunities to bolster their democracy, such as constitutional safeguards against certain forms of state surveillance.

Requiring 50% in a referendum is different from and safer than requiring 50% in a parliament vote. A parliament can go against the people that elected them.

It's an additional check. That's good, but it isn't always sufficient, because sometimes you can convince 51% of people to do something wrong.

If you can convince 51% of the population to do something wrong than you're already screwed and have much bigger issues to worry about.

Brexit?

Countries that don't regularly have popular votes face the challenge that any vote is considered as a vote of confidence in their current government. It basically only reflects the popularity of the government and people do not evaluate the face value, the core of the issue. Having a real democracy takes a lot of training and effort.

Exactly this. In Switzerland, you generally have 3-4 vote periods per year with 0-8 different subjects). This is needed to make sure that people vote on the subject.

Brexit was 52% of voters voting to leave, but that was only 37% of the electorate. [1] It wasn't >50% of the electorate, let alone >50% of the population.

[1] https://fullfact.org/online/brexit-referendum-electorate-lea...

...I'll argue that those that didn't participate in that vote elected to opt out. I.e. Don't cry if you didn't care to participate and then don't get what you wanted.

This is a referendum that changes the fundamental rules of the game, not a pizza order. The onus isn't on the population to waste their time vetoing your bad or mediocre ideas, it's on you to come up with good ideas. And disgusting your constituents enough that they abstain entirely should very much not be a viable strategy. If you want to change the constitution, you gotta convince people that you're doing something good, including those who are hard to convince. That's literally the entire point. If you're not managing that, clearly your change isn't good enough to make.

Anyway, I wasn't even trying to argue in favor of this position, or against it. I was merely replying to the parent comment that Brexit did not meet the threshold that their parent comment had suggested.

People got lazy lately after a long peace time. Saying “it can’t get worse than that” with 5-10% unemployment. Yes this is not good, but it can get way worse than that. Also “my vote doesn’t count, and everyone is bad”. Enemies of democracy have pushed this a lot lately, internet make it trivially cheap and easy to spread. Nations like UK are in the find out phase.

It sounds so easy to do

Constitutions can still be ignored, at least temporarily, by incumbent governments, as evidenced most recently by some actions of the current US administration.

Also, the sort of majority needed to enact a constitution change to install a protection in the first place, can be very difficult to attain.

And then you make it so when the tyrants do get back to 51% that they can just ignore the constitution instead. And might as well make sure there are only two major political parties so even though the tyrants ignore the constitution, that the other 49% will stay busy stuffing their pockets with foreign donations.

These are independent problems.

To prevent the government from ignoring the constitution, create remedies in each of the other branches of government. The US doesn't make this as strong as it should be. Constitutional challenges in the judiciary get shut down as a result of standing or sovereign immunity when that ought not to happen, and there should be a better mechanism for states to challenge federal constitutional violations.

The two-party system in the US is caused by first past the post voting. Use score voting instead. Not IRV, not some other nonsense, a rated voting system that removes the structural incentive to avoid spoilers by limiting the number of parties.

"The existing system isn't perfect" is why you improve it, not why you give up.

Approval voting is also worth considering, where you put a checkmark in the box for any candidate you’d be okay with. Advantage over ranked choice is that communicating the scoring to citizens is simple: “$CANDIDATE received the most checkmarks.” Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.

Approval voting would result in “the okay-est” candidate winning rather than anyone towards an extreme winning in the primaries. Works well when there are a lot of fairly similar milquetoast candidates that split votes, like the Republican primaries of 2015.

> Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.

Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.

Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.

Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.

Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.

Score voting is just approval voting with an additional permitted tactical error.

In both systems, the correct tactic is to determine the two candidates most likely to win. Then, assign maximum score to whichever of those is better and to everyone preferable to that candidate.

It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?

> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?

Because it is often correct.

Suppose there are candidates A, B and C. Candidates A and B are each polling around 6/10 and candidate C is polling around 4/10, but candidates A and B are quite similar to each other and share a base of support. According to your strategy, A and B are the two most likely to win, so if you prefer A then even though you still prefer B to C you refuse to express your preference and instead assign 10/10 to A and 1/10 to B and C. The voters who prefer candidate B do the same. The result is that A and B end each up at 3.5/10, C ends up at 4/10 and C wins. In other words, you've devolved back into first past the post and caused your least favored candidate to win because of your erroneous strategizing.

By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.

In your scenario, I have made a mistake in assessing which two candidates are most likely to win -- because I took vote shares as win probabilities. This is also a mistake, and it is a mistake no matter the voting system or the next step in your strategy.

You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me. If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.

> you've devolved back into first past the post

Correct. The potential for this to happen is one of the drawbacks of rated voting systems. It's also, through a different mechanism, one of the drawbacks of ranked systems. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, since both alternatives give some ability to hedge against incorrect assessments.

> By contrast, if you assign 10/10 to A, 5/10 to B and 1/10 to C, you've given A a significant advantage over B without assigning B such a low score that you could deliver the election to C if C defeats A.

I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10. Both give the same odds of winning to A and B (well, mine gives B slightly higher odds because its average is 5.5 -- but you get the point). The only difference is that your method outsources the randomness to the rest of the electorate, rather than generating it yourself.

> In your scenario, I have made a mistake in assessing which two candidates are most likely to win -- because I took vote shares as win probabilities.

Your problem is that your voting strategy changes which two candidates are most likely to win. If everyone votes their actual preferences then it's A and B. If too many people vote according to your strategy, C becomes a frontrunner.

> You're also assuming that everyone axiomatically uses the same strategy as me.

I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you. The higher that proportion is, the more likely it is that C wins instead of A or B. It doesn't have to be 100% of people to cross the threshold into changing the outcome.

> If A-voters use your strategy and B-voters use my strategy, then B is straightforwardly favored to win. This results in a prisoner's dilemma, with its well-known Nash equilibrium in favor of defection.

That isn't a prisoner's dilemma. A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.

> I can accomplish the same mathematical thing by assigning 10/10 to A, 1/10 to C, and flipping a coin to determine whether to give B 1/10 or 10/10.

But then the voting system is receiving less information from you. Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason. Also, most people are not going to do that and requiring them to in order to express their preferences is needlessly confusing.

just look at the VSE figures.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html

> I'm only assuming that some proportion of voters use the same strategy as you.

My strategy does not change other voters' strategies. Secret ballots prevent this type of coordination. That's my point. The collective strategy of 1/3 of the electorate does change which two candidates are most likely to win, but my individual strategy does not meaningfully do that.

> they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.

If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case. Hedging by assigning a non-maximal score increases the chance of the worst case compared to that approach, in exactly the same way that it reduces the chance of that compared to assigning a minimal score.

I'll grant that my specific tactic is predicated on a preference for achieving the best outcome rather than avoiding the worst one, but the best tactic for someone who finds avoiding the worst-case to be more important also only requires extreme votes.

> A's voters prefer that B win over C and B's voters prefer that A win over C, so they each have the selfish incentive to give their second choice a higher score than their third choice to prevent the worst-case outcome.

Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it. The secret ballot prevents any kind of enforced coordination. This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.

> Requiring your preferences to be expressed statistically increases the error bars for no reason.

You don't know the exact score each candidate will end up with absent your vote -- if you did, you could analytically determine a single-vote strategy that gives the best available outcome. Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression. It's just expressed in terms of the uncertainty in what the rest of the electorate is doing, not in terms of a coin flip. It does not meaningfully increase the error bars (in a large election -- say, >1k voters) because the former uncertainty quickly dwarfs the latter.

> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.

of course it does. this is basic game theory. but the point is, at some level of iterating on what other voters will do, you arrive at an effectively static "wave function" of possibilities, so you can behave as if you have constant fixed win probabilities for the other candidates, and vote accordingly.

just use VSE results.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html

> My strategy does not change other voters' strategies.

It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.

And it does because you are part of the electorate, situated the same as the others, so the strategy you devise should be the one that yields the result you want given that similarly situated people will reach the same conclusion:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

Special note for the critics of superrationality: Your vote isn't going to change the outcome, so according to classical game theory you should stay home instead of wasting your time doing something that doesn't matter. Therefore, voting at all is an exercise of superrationality. If you're not willing to use it in your voting strategy then you shouldn't use it in deciding whether to vote to begin with and so you should either use a superrational voting strategy or you should stay home.

> If a voter values preventing the worst case over achieving the best case, then the optimal strategy is to assign maximum scores to every candidate except the worst case.

You're not thinking probabilistically.

Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:

Option 1, candidate A is at 4.99/10, candidate B is at 5/10, candidate C is at 4/10.

Option 2, candidate A is at 4/10, candidate B is at 4.99/10, candidate C is at 5/10.

If it's option 1 and you assigned 10/10 to candidate B, your preferred candidate loses. If it's option 2 your preferred candidate can't win and if you assign 1/10 to candidate B, your least preferred candidate wins.

But if you assign 10/10 to candidate A and 5/10 to candidate B then in option 1 that could still be enough to see candidate A win, and in option 2 it could still be enough to see candidate C lose.

Moreover, the score allows you to express how concerned you are about each outcome. If you're pretty okay with candidate B but have a moderate preference for candidate A then you can give candidate B 7/10. If candidate B is almost as bad as candidate C you can give candidate B 3/10. It allows you to hedge: How much advantage for candidate A are you willing to give up to reduce the chances of candidate C? You seem to be assuming that the only possible answers are "all of it" or "none of it", but there are other options.

> Expressing that preference directly reduces the likelihood of each such voter's preferred outcome, even if a single voter does it. It affects the chance of the worst-case outcome only if voters on both sides of the A/B division do it.

If affects the chance of the worst-case outcome in all cases because it increases candidate C's chance against candidate B, and you don't know what the other voters are going to do. If candidate A has less support than expected due to inaccurate polling then it turns into a race between B and C regardless of whether B's supporters give A 1/10 or 5.5/10. Meanwhile you assigning a lower score to B is reducing B's chances against C regardless of why the race turns out to be between B and C.

> This is exactly a prisoner's dilemma.

No it isn't. In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does. In this case, if the other party defects -- and sometimes even if they don't -- then your defection harms you, because their defection (or something else) put candidate A behind candidate C. Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.

> Since you don't know that, your choice of an intermediate score is a statistical expression.

It has less information content. If you roll a D10 and then assign 10/10 to candidate B if it's above a 6 and 1/10 if it isn't, the voting system only gets a single bit of information from you, whereas assigning the equivalent score gives it >3 bits of information. That only matters if the election is very close, but it always only matters if the election is very close.

In 2024 there were dozens of state legislative races decided by fewer than 100 votes:

https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2024:_State_legisl...

> It does when you describe it to them and convince or force them to use it, e.g. by removing their ability to score the candidate on a scale.

This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors. Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me. Frankly, I philosophically reject both of these.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superrationality

Look, I buy superrationality from an ethical perspective. I favor the Kantian imperative as a framework (among others) for assessing ethical questions, and it's basically the same concept as superrationality.

Superrationality is not, however, a reasonable way to make practical decisions about scarce resources. The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives. In practical situations, one must deal with perverse incentives. My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).

> Suppose there are two plausible final election outcomes where your vote matters:

You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1. A winning isn't an option in either of these cases, even if there is some dataset about the world that makes this set of outcomes plausible.

Maybe try thinking about it this way: In score voting, points are summed and nonrivalrous. So, a point is a point -- regardless of how many other points you gave to that candidate. Why, then, are you choosing 5/10 for B, specifically? What, analytically, leads you to that choice? If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on. If you find it more important to cause an A victory, why not choose 4/10? A point is a point, no matter how many other points the candidate got from the same voter.

> In a prisoner's dilemma, defection is to your advantage regardless of what the other person does.

There are formulations of the prisoner's dilemma in which a double defection is worse for both parties than a single defection is for the losing party. But it's clear that this terminology is more confusing than helpful, so I'm OK abandoning it.

> Then it's not clear if your support for candidate A will allow them to defeat candidate C, but if it isn't, your defection in assigning the lowest possible score to candidate B would cause candidate C to defeat candidate B, which is to your own disadvantage.

Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum. This reasoning does not argue for a vibe-based score assignment, it argues for giving the maximum score to both A and B. By assigning a lower score to either, I have already accepted some risk.

> It has less information content.

Less information on the ballot, yes, but it has the same effect on the outcome. Let's exclude cases where my vote is irrelevant. I have ten options, and nine of them are potential numbers of additional points that a candidate needs to win. Each of those numbers are roughly equally likely, because they are the least significant bits (least significant bits in stochastic processes tend to approximate a uniform distribution).

If I give 1 point, the candidate wins 0/9 times. If I give 10 points, the candidate wins 9/9 times. If I give 5 points, the candidate wins if the number of additional points needed is 2-5 (1 would make my vote irrelevant), and loses if it's 6-10. So, the effect on the outcome is the same as if I gave 10 points 4/9 times.

The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.

> This is essentially the argument that it's good to allow other people to make tactical errors, because it gives more power to those who do not make such errors.

You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging. There are legitimate non-mistake reasons to do that.

> Or, perhaps, that I should take an approach that reduces the power of my vote on the basis that others might copy me.

You're not trying to get them to copy you, you're trying to devise a strategy that maximizes your advantage in the event that other people in exactly the same situation as you come to the same conclusion. In other words, knowing that people using the same reasoning as you will copy you, what reasoning do you choose to use?

> The reason is because it essentially ignores the problem of perverse incentives.

It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.

Or to consider it another way, think of it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. You sure you want to make "defect" your first move when the aggregate outcome will be public and there will be future elections?

> My voting does not create a perverse incentive for anyone else, and in fact it only benefits me (by signaling that I do vote, so my vote is worth competing for).

Voting is a perverse incentive for you. It takes time to cast a vote, the chances of it determining the outcome are entirely negligible and so is any notion that the candidates will know, much less change their behavior, based on whether you as an individual cast a vote. It's why so many people stay home, and everyone who doesn't is spending their own time to do otherwise because they altruistically prefer that the system work than that they save the time it takes them to do something that yields no personal benefit.

> You are claiming that I'm not thinking probabilistically, but first off: you're providing an overly specific scenario rather than a probabilistic one. Second, your own overly specific scenario does not even work. If the extra 4 points that I give to B (over the "preferred outcome" strategy) is enough to result in B defeating C in scenario 2, it is also enough to result in A defeating B in scenario 1.

You're ignoring the probabilistic part. It's not scenario 1 and scenario 2 at the same time. You don't know if it's scenario 1 or scenario 2, that's the thing that's indeterminate, and you have to fill out your ballot not knowing that. Then if you assign 10/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 1, you've given the election to B over A. But if you assign 1/10 instead of 5/10 to candidate B and it turns out to be scenario 2, you've given the election to C over B. Neither of those are in your interest, so you have the personal incentive to reduce their probabilities by assigning candidate B a score in the middle of the range.

> If you're trying to prevent a C victory as your most important value, why not choose 6/10? 7? And so on.

Because that's a trade off. There is no single "most important value". You want both for A to score higher than B and for B to score higher than C. Assigning a lower score to B makes one of the things you want more likely and the other one less likely. If you judge them to be equally important and equally probable then you should assign B a score in the middle to hedge your bets. If you judge one to be more important or more likely then you should weight the score in proportion to how much of your vote you're willing to spend to make one possibility more likely at the expense of the other. Assigning the maximal or minimal score assumes that you prioritize one thing entirely at the expense of the other. It's putting all of your eggs in one basket.

> Crucially, this is equally true for every other score I can assign to B less than the maximum.

Except that you're trading each of those increments against the probability of the other thing you want.

> The only reason this would meaningfully increase the variance is if a large fraction of people in a small election were doing this, too small for the central limit theorem to work its magic but enough people doing it to exceed the difference in fixed preferences.

But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?

Also, what benefit is being achieved by forcing ordinary voters to choose their vote using random number generation instead of simply allowing them to write down the number they would have used as the threshold?

> It isn't ignoring the problem, it's describing a solution to it: Enlightened self-interest.

"Everybody just does the right thing" is not a solution you can implement in the real world.

> You keep describing it as a tactical error to use a strategy that amounts to hedging.

Maybe this is the source of the confusion: an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge. A hedge is a decision that offsets potential losses in the event of a bad outcome. No vote configuration on a single question can do that. It can, in some cases, reduce the chance of a bad outcome. In the best case, it does so by also reducing the chance of a good outcome (in favor of a moderate outcome). But crucually, each point affects each outcome in the same way as each other point.

So, by what rational reason am I choosing an intermediate value? Why would I prefer (in a contrived example, but all cases are linear) a 20% chance of both the good outcome and the bad outcome over both a 25% chance and a 15% chance? Moving from 4 points to 5 always does the same thing as moving from 5 to 6. It's linear, so the local maxima and minima are at the ends.

> There is no single "most important value".

You are making a linear probabilistic trade-off between two values. One of them must be more important than the other in order for any score assignment to be better than any other. Either being more important than the other will drive the score to one extreme.

> But why would you admit even this deficiency just to avoid allowing yourself to specify a score instead?

It's not something I want people to actually do. It's a reduction ad absurdum. Your approach does the same thing as a random approach, so - barring deception reasons - it must be a mistake.

> an intermediate score is not an optimal way to hedge

1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.

https://www.rangevoting.org/RVstrat6

2. a lot of people will do it REGARDLESS of whether it's rational, just like people donate to charity. so YOU as a rational self-interested voter BENEFIT by using a voting method which allows you to receive utility donations from those altruistic voters, however irrational they may be. and that leads to a greater NET utility, because voting isn't a zero sum game. https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

again, it would really help you to just spend a few minutes reading elementary voting theory before going off on such a wild misguided tangent like this.

> 1. of course it is, if you're not mathematically savvy.

I don't think that says what you're claiming it does. If you actually look at the simulation linked from there (which I do take some issues with, but those are irrelevant to the point):

- Scaled sincerity, the one that gets their claimed 91% effectiveness, is actually one of the more mathematically complicated strategies to execute.

- Maxing + sincerity, the version of "mildly-optimized sincerity" that is least complicated to execute (and thus the one most likely to be executed intuitively), is among the least effective in large elections.

- Mean-based thresholding -- the closest approximation of my proposed strategies here, consistently outperforms all sincere-derived approaches in elections of 10+ participants. It is also simpler to execute than scaled sincerity.

> and that leads to a greater NET utility

This is not accounting for the reduced utility of increasing the complexity of the voting system, or of weakening the secret ballot by allowing more information content on it.

The latter is the real argument against score voting that I don't think has a counter. I haven't brought it up yet, because it's a lot less convincing if you believe that optimal individual strategy in score voting performs much better than optimal individual strategy in approval voting. But you, in particular, don't seem to believe that. So...

Score voting puts more information on the ballot than any other system, for an only marginal improvement over approval voting (which puts the second-least, after single vote). Putting more information on the ballot is bad, because it allows votes to be dis-aggregated. Attack description:

- Alice instructs Bob to fill out the ballot in a specific way. That specific way includes minor random perturbations of scores that are unlikely to influence the election result, but are likely to make Bob's ballot unique. E.g. selecting a random score for a candidate with a very low chance of victory, fully randomizing a question that Alice does not care about, or (worst case) adding or subtracting 1-5 percent from scores of relevant candidates.

- Alice observes the vote counting, and notes if Bob's ballot was observed.

- Alice rewards or punishes Bob accordingly

The value of the secret ballot is very high. I suggest that it is greater than any increase in utility achievable in the delta between score voting and approval voting.

yeah this is all explained here. score voting is even better than approval voting, obviously.

http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6

https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

tactical error is GOOD, because it donates more utility to society than that non-strategic voter loses. AND for a lot of not-so-math-savvy voters, an honest score ballot is actually a better vote than a botched attempt to use strategic approval thresholds.

http://scorevoting.net/RVstrat6

https://www.rangevoting.org/ShExpRes

> It is never correct to assign a score between the minimum and the maximum, so why allow it in the first place?

it would help you to spend at least 30 seconds researching a complex field like voting methods before asking a deeply misguided question like this.

approval voting is extremely good. https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/vse-graph.html

Constitutions are amended all the time. The French even have a proces for reboots of the Republic.

These are goods things.

The Indian Supreme Court introduced the Basic Structure Doctrine in 1970, allowing the judiciary to overrule constitutional amendments if they are found to contradict the "basic structure" of the constitution.

It's original purpose, if I understand correctly, was to guarantee that fundamental rights were an essential part of the constitution and couldn't be amended away.

Wikipedia says that multiple countries appear to have adopted the principle: Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Uganda.

No it's not. Constitutions are the bones of a republic. They are the framework that gives the government power and that checks that power. Letting it mess with that too much or too often is bad.

Constitutions should be simple. They should delegate very little power to governments and focus mostly on constraining those governments. They should be changed very rarely.

Adaptable government with changing scopes belongs at lower levels of governance (mostly very local) or nowhere.

France disagrees. They iterated 5 times on it and it fixed big flaws each time.

What keeps a country in check is not a constitution but a politically informed and active population. The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.

> The US shows us right now that the constitution is just a piece of paper.

A constitution isn't just words, it creates a structure that exists in actual reality. The day before the tyrant comes you have multiple branches and levels of government. That stuff doesn't instantaneously cease to exist if they try to rip up the piece of paper, and its purpose is to fight against anyone who tries to rip it up.

If it fails at that purpose, your constitution contained insufficient checks and balances.(Notice that several of the ones in the original US constitution have been removed, and that was a mistake.)

Another way to view the US constitution is that parts were amended away in roundabout ways (e.g. through state legislation) and precisely because it is so set in stone that we now have the problems that we see.

France had a vastly bloodier path to that constitution as you know. And france’s constitution today is pretty bad. It fails to protect basic freedoms like speech and arms. It moves too much responsibility to the feds. Etc.

Constitutions that are easy to amend are basically universally a piece of toilet paper.

That's how you ossify.

If preventing the government from abusing the population is ossification then the government should be made entirely out of bones.

In the USA we have amendments to the constitution, which take considerable political effort to change. These amendments can restrict the types of laws that may be passed.

This system works because the changes are not just recorded in the paper of some lawbook, but in the minds of the people.

This is not true in practice. Inertia and international law / agreements bind future lawmakers. If one government joins the EU, the next still has to follow EU law even if EU law changes.

An existing law can be different to change, than where non exists and its greenfield for something half baked to roll in.

This was my understanding, which is why I was so surprised to read of Trump's edict preventing state-level AI laws for ten years.

That prevention is called the Constitution. It regulates what kinds of law can or cannot be made.

> It’s odd people don’t push for laws to prevent for these kinds of laws to keep bubbling up every few years.

People don't have a lot of money and a revolving door with the government, like the lobby industry has. As long as corruption is legalized, in the form of lobby, regular people will find it very hard to influence the government.

every law is temporal, until it gets re-written or killed outright

Either the people living in the country at the time rule (directly or through representatives), or its not a democracy, but (if they are ruled by the people, or their representatives, of the past) a thanatocracy.

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Thanks, I LOLed!

Proton being about as brave as putting an apple on one's head and a blindfold on....in front of an infant with the parts of a Glock in front of them and no ammunition

What a bunch of performative nonsense on their behalf.

Proton didn't just market 'Swiss privacy,' they built real engineering around non-retention—no logs, no trackers, nothing to subpoena. If Switzerland erodes that, the only defensible move for actual privacy builders is to exit and redeploy somewhere the law aligns with technical reality. Anything else is security theater.

If law passes, if Proton leaves, what matters most isn't their press release—it's the engineers voting with their code and hardware locales.

To be fair Protonmail has much more to offer than "just" privacy friendly legislation. The free web mail client is full-featured, time tested and has no ads. That in my opinion already puts it ahead among the main mail providers. Also it has the Proton bridge, VPN etc. etc. I'd say it really depends on the personal threat model and willingness to DIY. My main complaint with it is bad interoperability with gpg though. (I'm not sure how anything less is supposed to help with end-to-end privacy...)

> The free web mail client is full-featured, time tested and has no ads.

I'm currently paying for proton mail, but I'll be migrating away for it once my current period expires, exactly because it's not full-featured.

It has the worst search I have ever seen in a mail client. Even after enabling content search it's as good as utterly useless.

Well yeah, I mean it has browser-based e2e encryption which is why search only applies to subjects/addresses. For more Proton bridge is needed. IIRC it's possible to also search the message bodies directly but it's quite slow.

Techradar popped up a full screen something with "you may also want to read..." when i hit the browser back button.

Entshittification continues...

And they will go where? To the Netherlands or Sweden? EU regulation applies there. They would have to go to Seychelles or Panama, but their servers would obviously still have to be elsewhere.

Switzerland would be useless if it can't remain a safe haven.

Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/a-dangero...

It was also Swedish EU commissioner who wants to ban end-to-end encrypted chats and brought various proposals to the EU for this.

> Sweden, having their legacy in social democracy and more state control, hates privacy

Generally, this is because Swedes trust the state.

I wouldnt trust their state, the one that argued for infecting their entire population with covid to achieve herd immunity, the one that bent the knee to the US when they wanted a sex scandal to arrest Assange, the one who wont release information they have about blown up gas pipelines in their back yard. I shouldnt pick on Sweden, all countries are like this now.

I think Sweden was one of the best countries how it handle Covid. Assange is a farce on the other hand.

Hot take but it makes sense to get rid of privacy under certain circumstances. What if we created a political system where you can trust the government to do a good, honest job. Privacy is needed because goals of the government aren't always aligned with goals of the society, but what if that wasn't the case.

Once you lose privacy, you can never get it back.

The population may trust the government now, but totalitarian regimes are returning to fashion and love when they can skip the data collecting bureaucracy and go straight into building or offshoring their gulags.

The problem is that while the goals of today's government may align with all of society (which is already never going to happen), that says nothing about a future government. That future government may have far more nefarious interests and then use data gathered under the government that was trusted to achieve their goals.

yeah, what if? :P

What does social democracy have to do with hating privacy?

The UK, US, Australia, and other capitalist flagships are all trying to do the same. Not to mention the Patriot Act.

I guess the human temptation to want to know what people are saying behind your back goes beyond political/economic systems.

Not sure about the others but UK is a bona fide social democratic country.

"Crony capitalist", it's not actual capitalism when the government has its fingers and regulatioms in everyone's finances.

Social democracy is also capitalism.

I’d rather word that differently. High-trust societies with little expectation of privacy and valuing community tend to do well with social democracy. Otherwise people end up abusing the system and it’s hard to catch them if privacy trumps community needs.

Here in ex-USSR country people are very pro privacy and individualist. At the same time we try to copy a lot of Nordic stuff from our neighbors. It’s a shitshow how those cultures mesh. A lot of welfare abuse, hiding beyond muh privacy to avoid scrutinity.

> "This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia," said Yen.

They can go anywhere in Europe, since that type of surveillance seems to be illegal

The issue is that countries may not care. The Danish government famously refuses to comply with EU verdicts that makes logging all phone calls and spying on text messages illegal. The Danish supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights have agreed with the government that "it's fine" in a "please think of the children"-moment.

That seems to be a contradiction. If the courts (the body tasked with deciding what is and isn't illegal) agree with the government than by definition its not illegal.

That's outrageous. Would you have a source for this?

There was a whole special interest group set up to handle the law suites: https://ulovliglogning.dk/ all the law suites are on their page, but in Danish. One of the previous ministers of justice flat said he didn't care, as long as it help catch "the bad guys". This a guy who was the leader of the Conservatives. A party that brands itself as the party of law and justice, except when they don't like the verdicts apparently.

You can also read about the reaction to the verdict in 2017 (again in Danish): https://www.version2.dk/artikel/bombe-under-ti-aars-dansk-te... where the EU deems the Danish logging unlawful, and the police and the government reacts by ignoring the verdict and wanting even more logging. There is a bunch of followup and related links at the bottom. The site is a tech news site owned by the Danish Engineers Union.

There's a Wikipedia page on what is being logged and retained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_retention#Denmark

It's somewhere between an over-interpretation of EU rules and a misunderstand of the usefulness of the collected data, but the end result is that every single person in Denmark is basically logged and tracked 24/7, unless they go completely offline.

Thanks so much!

Should be noted that Denmark is not the only country that weasels its way around bans on mass surveillance like that.

Take Belgium, which took the "mass surveillance by default is illegal" and introduced a law that forced mass surveillance in areas that exceeded a certain legal threshold, designed specifically to include every single town in Belgium except for some tiny town where almost nobody lives.

Other European countries have applied similar workarounds. They're all pretty much dead the moment they hit the courts, but as long as the public doesn't know and nobody bothers to start a lawsuit, the mass surveillance continues.

"Data retention", as the industry calls it, is still active far and wide across Europe. Some countries retain said data for days at most, others for years.

What happened to the ideas of offshore data centers and seasteading and pirate radio? Is it time to bring those back (again)?

It was always stupid, because that is not how laws work.

only musk can save datacenters from reaches of earths governments.

by transporting every cargo to USA for thorough inspection before flight.

Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?

The problem would be all the debris up there. Maybe destroying one satellite would destroy them all.

> Isn't the cost of taking down a satellite lower than putting it up?

Probably not for Starlink. You’ve got mass-manufactured satellites in a constellation launched on a reüsable, profitable platform on one hand. And on the other hand you have experimental expendable ASAT weapons.

How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture.

The anti-satellite side has a budget hundreds to thousands of times cheaper, based on average ball bearings to satellite density in orbit, with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.

> How much does it cost to launch ball bearings into an intersecting orbit? They are even cheaper to mass-manufacture

Approximately as much as a finished satellite or block or gold of similar mass. The bulk of the cost is in launch and aiming.

Imagine you're standing on a simplified earth that's a perfect sphere, with no air resistance, and have a gun that has a muzzle velocity of orbital speed.

There are 40,000 SUVs randomly located on the planet.

You fire randomly in the horizontal plane.

What's the probability of you hitting an SUV, and not yourself in the back 84 minutes later?

The earth is big. The probability isn't zero, but for any given orbits period it is low. And both the ball bearings and the satelites will re-enter after a while.

> You fire randomly in the horizontal plane

Why randomly, if you're aiming for objects in an known orbit?

Because you wrote:

> with a decent spread and multiple orbit intersections per day.

If you miss one — and you probably will without active guidance, imagine aiming said gun at an SUV seven time zones away — everything's in a different place by your next close approach. Your ball bearings and the target both, thanks to chaotic pertubations, boosts, drag, etc.

Is not changing BGP route cheaper than taking down a satanlite ? Sorry, satellite.

If privacy service providers have to keep logs anywhere, they lose all technical credibility—doesn't matter if you're registered in Panama, the Netherlands, or Mars. Perhaps, we should design systems where compliance is impossible and data simply doesn’t exist by default.

Norway has also been a popular destination for these types of services.

As a Norwegian I would not feel safe hosting such here.

Of the ~10 parties with a chance of a seat at the parlament, absolutely none have any clue what so ever when it comes to IT security matters.

The major parties have multiple times attemted to push egregious laws like collecting all internet metadata in our country, and storing it for years. They argued it wouldn't be a risk because only authorized personel would have access...

Sheer luck has twarted those attempts.

There are 5 million people living in Norway and you have 10 parties in the parliament? Talk about divided country.

Denmark is a little under 6 million people, there are currently 12 parties eligible for election. That not really uncommon, the Netherlands also have a fairly large number of parties.

It seems more crazy to believe that two, three or four parties can represent 80 million or more people. The truth is that many of the parties in countries like Norway and Denmark are all fairly similar. They mostly agree on the basics. Six of the twelve parties in Denmark are, in my mind, variations on Social Democrats. I'm sure many would disagree, but they vary on issues, that in countries like the US, would be considered implementation details or narrow topics.

I assure you forcing everyone into one of two options results in way more division. You can probably imagine why.

That's much less divided than, say, the US, with its two party system.

Any party is much less likely to have a dominance, and they'd have to play along with the others to form a coalition.

I'd argue that this is much more what a democracy should be like and much more representative of the wide range of people and voices that our countries (Norway, Netherlands, etc) have compared to the "divide-in-the-middle" politics that are common to the US.

This is fairly common for smaller parliamentary systems; you can think of it as a side effect of proportional representation.

500,000 people aligned to a party platform isn't wild.

Claiming that 100,000,000+ are aligned to a party platform is much more crazy.

A continuous spectrum is only divided if it has too few bins.

This is quite normal in Europe.

E.g. there are currently 14 political parties with at least one seat in the UK Parliament - but most of them only have a very small number of seats.

Norwegians seem to me, an outsider, quite cohesive as a society. Much more so than just about any place i’ve spent time in. But they also seem to allow for a fair bit of diversity in certain things, politics being one — but only within certain parameters, so I suspect the differences between the parties are more around specific issues up for debate than big ideological / identity concerns, as they are in the US, for example.

If someone knows a Norwegian datacentre offering colocation, that has no connection to USA, please let me know.

I have no experience with them, so not a recommendation, but perhaps https://greenmountain.no?

They're owned by an israeli company nowadays fwiw

They deploy Pegasus from there or what would Israeli company need in there ?

Seems mostly to be a real-estate investment but the ownership structure is a bit opaque. Their DCs host some critical infrastructure for banks.

Oh, I missed that.

I somehow missed them. Thanks for the information. I’m afraid that the lack of public prices and an invitation to contact their salesman means it’s as expensive as it could be, but I’m sure Proton can afford.

That's normal for colocation. It's not a jellybean service. It's something you have to individually negotiate with your supplier. We've been spoiled by being able to rent virtual servers that are all the same within one provider. Colocation is not all the same. ("Jellybean" is what electronics people call basic parts that are commodities, as opposed to, say, highly specialized integrated circuits. Some say it comes from when electronic part stores would have them in jellybean jars. You could just grab one out of the jar because the individual differences didn't really matter.)

There are some places that have jellybean colocation offers (e.g. Hetzner does - notice their normal business is jellybean servers and they run their own data centers, so it looks like a no-brainer to fit colocation into that business model), but it only covers a small portion of colocation possibilities.

But typically colocation is just one of those products where every deal is fully custom. That's just how it is. So you have to buy enough of the product to make it worth the salesman's and engineer's time, meaning at least a couple hundred dollars a month worth.

By the way, the same is true for business internet access. If you pay the cheapest price for internet (as every residential user does), you get the same basic service as everyone else. But if you're willing to spedn enough money, your ISP will negotiate with you. Though I hear it sometimes takes some prodding to get past the "residential area == ordinary residential connection" assumption (and in many cases their network may not support certain upgrades). And it's true for business transactions in general. You want five screws, grab the best match off the shelf. You want five million screws, we'll make them to your exact specifications boss. (Also related: If you owe the bank a hundred billion dollars, the bank has a problem.)

Having worked in the hosting and colo business in Scandinavia, it's normally not cheap. It's been a few years, but you're starting around €500 per month (in 2016 I think we could get you started at €350) and frequently you'll need to take at least a quarter of a rack.

Most hosting companies doesn't even really want colocation anymore, it's sort a niche product.

There's several that don't have immediate exposure to the US, like Bulk, Telenor, Blix, Orange Business Service (former Basefarm). Most of these are in or around Oslo.

Mullvad operates out of Sweden. Unlike proton, mullvad doesnt have to respond to court orders. proton gives up user info thousands a year its right on their transparency page.

All entities with known physical addresses have to respond to court orders, or men with guns will break into those addresses and kidnap whoever is supposed to have responded.

Correction:they do in fact have to respond to court orders, but they can't give any info as they simply do not have it.

Mullvad stores account (kyc) + payment information in line with Swedish tax laws for (I think) 7 years.

What Mullvad apparently don't have are data-plane logs. But then, surveillance laws mandate forceful & secret compliance in certain cases (Mullvad may be exempt but who knows: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43018290)

Doesn't Mullvad accept cash without identifying information?

Yes, they do. They accept Monero too.

Proton isn’t giving up VPN users. It’s giving up mail users. There’s a huge legal difference.

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Lichtenstein is closer and uses the CHF.

And their military defense is outsourced to Switzerland.

But is an absolute monarchy (e.g. non-independent judiciary).

I feel like you need to complete this thought. Australia has an independent judiciary, and look what they did to tech privacy. So I'm not seeing how it follows that an absolute monarchy is a hindrance.

This is very specious reasoning. At least in Australia if you have a legal problem there is a full court system set up that can help you – Liechstenstein is basically just a state owned by a single man attached to a bank (LGT) owned by the same man.

Australia's "full court system" completely failed to stop "Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018", where by people can be compelled to install security backdoors at the behest of law enforcement.

It looks like Prince Hans-Adams is much more able to protect peoples civil liberties than Australias westminster system.

But it isn't.

To quote wikipedia: "Liechtenstein is a semi-constitutional monarchy".

It is probably as close as you get though in modern europe.

It's a country where if the Prince decides he doesn't like you, well, he can bring the entire administrative arm of the state down upon you. It's basically a European version of the UAE – not a great place to be.

They had a popular vote to decide if the prince could overrule the democratic government, and the people voted that they prince could. seems to work for them, they hare rich and happy

Yes, because it's a tax haven. That doesn't mean it would be sensible for Proton to move there!

How delightfully paradoxical to see democracy vote itself out of power.

Who sponsored this??

Best I could find as a non Swiss:

> Threema and Proton In the daily news of 'SRF', Jean-Louis Biberstein, the deputy head of the federal postal and telecommunications service, said that the requirements for service providers are not tightened, but merely specified. A company like Threema would have the same obligations as before after the revision. Threema contradicts this in a statement from the end of April. The Vüpf revision would force the company to abandon the principle of "only collecting as few data as technically required".

(From auto translation of report about this already failing to proceed.)

Is Federal Post the entity or is it a person, or a group in Swiss government seeking to take authority over information?

Seems like the translation failed to translate the job title properly...

This government page https://www.li.admin.ch/en/ptss says that dude is in charge of the "Legal Affairs and Controlling" division of the "Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service", and it continues to describe what that division does.

Small logical question - How can proton deliver mail to you if it does not save anything ?

The contents of the emails are encrypted so you have a normal login plus a key to unencrypt your email locally. They save your encrypted email conyents and your login but not the key and they also don't log your access (I'm assuming here from reading the article).

They might log access in some circumstances, according to their privacy policy (https://proton.me/legal/privacy)

> 2.5 IP logging: By default, we do not keep permanent IP logs in relation with your Account. However, IP logs may be kept temporarily to combat abuse and fraud, and your IP address may be retained permanently if you are engaged in activities that breach our Terms of Service (e.g. spamming, DDoS attacks against our infrastructure, brute force attacks). The legal basis of this processing is our legitimate interest to protect our service against non-compliant or fraudulent activities. If you enable authentication logging for your Account or voluntarily participate in Proton's advanced security program, the record of your login IP addresses is kept for as long as the feature is enabled. This feature is off by default, and all the records are deleted upon deactivation of the feature. The legal basis of this processing is consent, and you are free to opt in or opt out of that processing at any time in the security panel of your Account. The authentication logs feature records login attempts to your Account and does not track product-specific activity, such as VPN activity.

See also section 3, "Network traffic that may go through third-parties."

To me the value prospect of Proton falls down even before that - how can e-mail ever be a secure medium of communication if only one side of the conversation is secure, given how ubiquitous Google and Outlook are in the space?

This is a valid point, but emails between Proton users (or other users of PGP) will not be accessible. And, presumably, it will be harder to see your email if you use Proton, than if you used Google/Outlook if your adversary had to look through everyone else's email to find who corresponded with you.

proton account to proton account.

> how can e-mail ever be a secure medium

Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.

I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.

> I am curious to know what is behind these big US companies being so anti privacy.

Google has an email service so that it can ingest all your communication and use it to better target ads. If Google didn't have access to the content of your emails, there wouldn't be much point to Gmail.

Microsoft mostly cares about enterprises, and enterprises generally don't want E2EE email; they have legal requirements to retain e-mail of employees, and have their own reasons to want to be able to access employee emails sometimes.

Apple... I don't know where they stand on this.

> Email can be secure, it’s just that the big US players can’t or won’t agree to proton like privacy.

Protonmail is not standards compilant. You can't login to your protonmail account from Thunderbird or k9 mail. Yes, they have an IMAP bridge, but it's proprietary / requires a paid account. Thus you're locked in to the official protonmail clients

Have you seen this thing?

https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge

I'm not too familiar with it, but we're building Marco (https://marcoapp.io) and a customer just showed it to me recently.

I hold Proton CEO to his word. I will also terminate my paid account with Proton if they dont leave (to give weight to his word). And Swiss will be on my ban list as well for ANY online services.

What they would tout as their USP then? Ex-Swiss Privacy?

Title needs a dash after Google, otherwise it reads weirdly

No more "Swiss-Privacy" then.

Another day, another digital illiterate politician trying to regulate the digital world

> a "major violation of the right to privacy" that will also harm the country's reputation and its ability to compete on an international level.

Exactly. Were the fear mongers and authoritarians so successful that the infected organism starts acting against its own wellbeing?

A lot of theater

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No, he didn't. You're thinking of the story where he expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and where he subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side.

Implying support for Trump here borderlines deceitful disinformation.

Why didn't you just look it up before making that comment?

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru...

This was discussed on HN as well.

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It seems to me that security and surveillance conscious folks tend to sit on either extreme of the spectrum

Because governments aren't persecuting people in the middle of the spectrum.

Being docile could be the definition of being in the middle of the spectrum

Being in the center of the political spectrum doesn't make you "docile." What a ridiculous notion.

Extremists love to make themselves as victims, and those on both sides hate moderates.

It's all bullshit of course.

I agree with you in that what I said might not be true for US politics

Then why do they need to spy on people? I mean, I agree with you. The center parties typically aren't persecuting massive amounts of people for their beliefs and "thought crimes", but they do still seem a little to happy to spy on people.

Probably more relevant in multi-party parliamentary systems, but someone pointed out that: if the left wing parties and the liberales agree on a policy, you should probably just implement it immediately. (Said about the Danish Red–Green Alliance and the Liberal Alliance, an eco-socialist party and a right-wing liberal party respectably).

Politics isn’t a line. Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.

You’re right tho in that it does seem like people who reject the lies their government tells them may be slightly more likely to say things that upset you on the internet (since I’m guessing that’s what you mean by persicution)

I was using persecution as a response to the parent post, which I took to mean that the far left and right are more likely to persecute political opponents and expect persecution themselves, so they are reluctant to approve of government surveillance out of fear that they are on the receiving.

> Center in most countries is “fine with whatever the government tells me” from forced medical experimentation to genocide.

This is a strawman, plain and simple. Calling the political center of any country "fine with genocide" isn't an argument, it's a smear. I'm a centrist democrat, I'm not fine with either of those things and you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is. You can disagree with moderates like me, but painting them as compliant with atrocities is dishonest and lazy.

> Politics isn’t a line

No disagreement here, sometimes it's a horseshoe and you're proving the theory true.

> Calling the political center of any country "fine with genocide" isn't an argument, it's a smear.

Well the US isn't doing genocide really so yeah it's a smear.

But moderates run the status-quo. MLK talked about how the biggest hurdle to integration and civil rights wasn't racists - it was the moderate white man. Ultimately things are the way they are because there are so many moderates who propose no solutions to anything and are terrified of anything that could be misconstrued as a change.

Moderates are, by in large, complacent with atrocities currently going on in the government they belong to. Moderates in Israel certainly seem fine with genocide. Moderates in the US are fine with the US' war-mongering. They're fine with the pseudo-slavery system that exists in some US states like Georgia.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone tried to clumsily wield MLK's Birmingham Letter as a moral fulcrum to dismiss modern centrism. That letter was written at a specific moment in time, aimed at a narrow group of people -- white moderates who used "order" as an excuse for inaction on civil rights. He wasn’t condemning all moderation for all time, and invoking his letter every time a moderate calls for practical reform over revolution cheapens its message.

> Ultimately things are the way they are because there are so many moderates who propose no solutions to anything and are terrified of anything that could be misconstrued as a change.

Are moderates "terrified" of the change itself, or do you disagree with how they want to get there? When I call myself a moderate, I don't do it because I'm "terrified" of a better healthcare system; I do it because I want reforms that are realistic, durable and broadly supported. I want change, but I want a solid plan and incremental steps to get us there -- not fiery rhetoric and slogans that crash the economy.

> Moderates in Israel certainly seem fine with genocide.

I'm not Israeli and don't pay attention to their politics, but you're playing a rhetorical shell game here by exporting the moral failure of one electorate and applying them to moderates of all electorates across the entire world. If you want to critique e.g. US policy, do it on the merits, not by hitching your argument to atrocities halfway around the world and then implying guilt by association.

> They're fine with the pseudo-slavery system that exists in some US states like Georgia.

I'm pretty in tune with US politics and I can't figure out what you're referencing here. Are you talking about for-profit prisons and prison labor? I agree that those things need to be abolished, and that's why I supported Biden ending federal contracts with private prisons. As someone who has had several family members in the prison system, I sincerely hope to see more criminal justice reform.

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Why do you say so? Genuinely asking.

I'm not into Proton, as their offer is both too costly for me and overkill for my needs. Still, in which way do you think they're scamming people?

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> Their CEO seems to like trump

As far as I know this is a "rumour" that stems from him mentioning his approval over one of Trump's cabinet pick. Saying he likes Trump is a stretch.

Someone dug deeper into this topic: https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-tr...

TL;DR: probably not a Trump supporter

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>seems to like trump

THROW HIM IN JAIL!

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Switzerland paid restitutions and changed it's laws which can't be said for crimes committed by many others. While the past should not be white washed it's been 80 years now.

A better question is how many banks does Switzerland still have? UBS is threatening to leave if they need to meet the new capitalization requirements the government wants.

It’s still somewhat of a current topic though.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/nazi-ties-to-credit-suis...

Interesting

I'm sure UBS will try to claim that they didn't aquire the liabilities of CS just like Bayer and Dow try too with their acquisitions. However since this acquisition was basically forced upon UBS they would probably have a much better chance in court...

Private banks are very different from consumer banks in Switzerland. You might as well consider them as different kinds of things.

> A better question is how many banks does Switzerland still have?

Something like 9% of Swiss GDP comes from banking and insurance.

A lot but that's irrelevant.

Bringing up Nazis, terrorists, and “the children” is always relevant to privacy detractors who think it’s suspicious for regular people to not want to be spied on.

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You can disagree with the 2nd amendment but if anything, the reverse is short-sighted. You're suggesting that we massively increase the power of the government forever to solve a short-term security problem.

Common sense says that it’s already illegal. They don’t need common sense legislation, they need common sense interpretation of it.

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> Long story short, the CEO has publicly backed Trump, Vance, and other officials in this new regime

This claim is not supported by your source. Do you have anything stronger than a Reddit thread?

It’s “batshit crazy” to support a politician the majority of the country voted for?

Not to be pedantic, but Donald Trump received around 77 million votes in the 2024 presidential election, which would be around 23% of the then population, I think.

I wouldn’t say the correction is necessarily pedantic because non voters’ opinions do count and matter, but it also doesn’t materially change the argument. Calling the majority of people (millions) who voted in an election “batshit crazy” translates to, it’s not possible to rationally disagree with me, everyone who does must be crazy. A totally immature, unproductive though sadly common mindset that we should make a conscious effort to avoid.

Moreover it suggests the holder hasn’t thought through the position of the opposition which in turn means they really don’t deeply understand even their own convictions.

If millions of people agree about something, there’s a rational explanation.

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Using percentages is illegitimate. It's frog boiling.

Governments lean on large providers like Microsoft to not implement strong technological privacy protections because they want to invade everyone's privacy, and those companies go along because they want to get government contracts or curry favor with government regulators, or because they want to invade your privacy themselves.

Then anyone privacy-conscious abandons them before any abuses are revealed because they've seen this movie before and know what's coming next. But that includes criminal organizations, so now for a transient period of time the competing services that still protect privacy have a disproportionate number of criminals. This is then used as an excuse to shut them down or force them to stop protecting anyone's privacy.

That's when the real abuses start, because the privacy-protecting services have been suppressed as "only used by criminals" and once the general public has lost the ability to switch, there is no longer competitive pressure on the incumbents to not betray their now-captive user base.

You can try to prevent this by getting people to switch to the privacy-protecting services ahead of time, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to accept the consent-manufacturing tactic as legitimate either.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uQLvakPXOA

12 milion per day - iraqi mafia tasking 14 year olds with arson, robbery, murder in australia...

12 year old selling drugs in russia enabled by technology : https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/russia-drug-trade-orga...

EDIT: state backed use of proton : https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/lawless-cyberspace-why...

Criminals use general purpose tools. It isn't the role of cutlery manufacturers to address muggings.

Sounds wise.

EDIT: not be toxic vs toxic - your car can be used for illegal purposes. that is why it has license plate, vin,...

so you are saying make every car same model, blackened windows, same color, no license plate.

> your car can be used for illegal purposes. that is why it has license plate, vin

License plates identify vehicles rather than individuals and when they were introduced it was infeasible to use them for mass surveillance. They're now becoming a problem and something is going to have to be done about it.

Their ostensible purpose is to identify the vehicle in case it gets stolen or is in an accident, not as a form of location tracking. But this is why "slippery slope" is not a fallacy. Not only are they now used for location tracking, they're being used as a precedent to rationalize further invasions of privacy. If they can track your car, why shouldn't they be able to track your phone? If they can track your phone, why shouldn't they be able to read your email? The answer is that they shouldn't be able to do any of these things without a warrant.

also criminals are part of warfare inside of USA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yECBOAfhRWg

yet it has nothing to do with Proton and everything to do with encryption and the reason why you hear the name Proton is because they open their mouth

> in current situation where more than 1 200 000 accounts there are

Both evidence and a basis for comparison (total number of accounts) are necessary before this claim is worth considering.

please, sun raises on east.

Maintaining democracy during peace time is easy. During war time it’s hard.

It’s also exactly the time where we should do work our hardest to maintain democracy.

I would recommend reading the Lincoln letter to William H. Herndon dated Feb. 15. 1848

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Kennedy.

Yet we cant even endure tariffs meant to stop war.

> to assure the survival and the success of liberty. Kennedy.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

Benjamin Franklin.

What war are tariffs meant to stop?

china vs north america AND europe

+

chinese proxy war in ukraine, russia is just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-access/area_denial

essentially USA needs Taiwan to not be invaded by china, with taiwan in chinese hands, even korea will have to do very hard thinking about western direction. which will be disastrous for USA, EU.

Taiwan ramped up production of shells. Czech republic is buying shells from them to send to ukraine ( "czech ammunitions initiative" ) so taiwan is able sustain expanded manufacturing capability needed for china taiwan conflict.

so czechs are praised for this by other NATO members because essentially, chinese proxy war is making taiwan more secure against china...

china wanted to invade taiwan in 2027 that is why biden, trump are relocating chip manufacturing to US for last 7 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzhuXY9LBR8

EDIT: look up that part of russia between two inland seas, where georgia and azerbaijan are connecting russia with iran.

that part is so important that russia had to invade crimea, wage russo-georgian war just to be able to secure that part / land connection with iran.

ukrainian territories currently occupied by russia are "just" AA/AD zone for protection of rostov-on-don which is main railroad, seashipping hub for that iran russia connection land part.

also criminals are part of warfare inside of USA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yECBOAfhRWg