The 7 member Executive Council is composed of the top 7 candidates from each election. The chairperson of the executive council rotates each year, so that the top 4 vote winners each get a turn at being chairperson.
This means that different social and political priorities get implemented in turn. It also means the way the government works is more cooperative, because each council member, including the chairperson, knows there will be a new chairperson next year.
So, if a pro-business candidate places 1st, and an environment candidate 2nd, and a social welfare candidate 3rd, and a libertarian candidate 4th, it is in all their interests to cooperate and create legislation that serves all of their interests as much as possible. Instead of disregarding the environment, the pro-business council member is encouraged to develop green business initiatives that will be supported for the full 4 year term under the different chairs.
The system creates a leadership team that looks for win-win, rather than a sole victor who can abuse majority rule.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)
But that's what makes this country so great. We take our divisions, within cantons, and leverage them for positive externalities to (accidentally) benefit the greater good.
In CH, every very canton sets their own citizenship policy. Its not a coincidence. Did you hear about the woman that's been living in Zug, and been denied citizenship for years? Why? Because she's annoying. She doesn't respect her neighbor's customs. That's literally why. Yes! Our canton can't even agree between about who can be a citizen, and who may not! But we argue far more... and it won't make the papers. We argue about the standard size of doors, whether we can vote electronically, whether a free trade agreement with andorra should be allowed. Etc etc
This means, big project ambitions get cut down to size, and few grand things if any, get done at the federal level. But this is glorious: it is very hard for regulations to become calcified within the state apparatus.
So, while spain sends soldiers to die in Afghanistan, or the UK wastes decades of development on a grand EU project, or US citizens get spied on by their own govt via Patriot Act.... CH is just sitting pretty, doing its thing. Arguing about every little detail to exhaustion.
The best thing that could happen to us, is to remain just as we are. I welcome the next 800 years of peace and economic development.
And yet, Switzerland's nationalised train network is one of the most extensive and effective in the world.
How did that happen?
The good thing that came out from it is that I realized that even Switzerland's central bank cannot be trusted, and moved to Bitcoin. I never looked back.
Switzerland can afford to do this because it's surrounded by countries that protect it from the real world. It doesn't have a real foreign policy because it doesn't have to.
>The best thing that could happen to us, is to remain just as we are. I welcome the next 800 years of peace and economic development.
That's not up to you. As I've said earlier, you're lucky to be surrounded by countries with bigger fish to fry as long as Switzerland toes the line.
"In 1991 following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI) became the last Swiss canton to grant women the vote on local issues."
Notice how it was a court decision, not a result of the political process. I'd say 1991 is a bit too late to have full voting rights for women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
What I admire about the Swiss is how they live and let live - they may disagree with the neighbour, but let them be.
The executive council is elected by the parliament and also contains candidates that haven't been member of that parliament. This election takes part "seat by seat", so every member has to be explicitly re-elected.
Since it's not done by popular vote, political games in that process are rare or just not excessive. The people trust the parliament with the process of electing their leaders, you better shouldn't fail them. So they mostly elect according to the current concordance.
> Until 1999, the Constitution mandated that no canton could have more than one representative on the Federal Council. Until 1987, the place of origin was used to determine which canton a Federal Councilor was from. After 1987, the place of residence (or, for councilors who were previously members of the Federal Assembly or of a Canton's legislative or executive body, the canton from which they were elected) became the determinant factor. Nothing prevented candidates from moving to politically expedient cantons, though, and the rule was abandoned in 1999. Since then, the Constitution has mandated an equitable distribution of seats among the cantons and language regions of the country, without setting concrete quotas. Whenever a member resigns, he/she is generally replaced by someone who is not only from the same party, but also the same language region. In 2006, however, Joseph Deiss, a French Swiss, resigned and was succeeded by Doris Leuthard, a German-speaking Swiss, and in 2016, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, German-speaking, was succeeded by Guy Parmelin, a French Swiss.
https://apnews.com/article/health-legislation-coronavirus-pa...
I am not responding to your expression of opinion - just clarifying how the Swiss electoral system is structured.
That vote was a referendum, which is another component of the Swiss system, separate and complimentary to the Executive Council.
If the proposal had been for the government to issue and control the identities, it may well have passed.
(said by a jealous French citizen)
As you said overwhelming majority, are there any countries that have direct democracy or come close?
I suggest you google the definition.
It's definitely a bad idea, but just because something is a bad idea does not magically make it facism.
If you think stuff like this being okay in the hands of a government then you might want to reexamine that line of reasoning, given that most governments are barely any better than corporations at the end of the day...
Ironically, there's a >50% chance that the solution will entail 1) privately hosted platforms like AWS and 2) privately hosted support services and 3) privately written core modules (McKinsey business strategy, Accenture implemented etc.) and 4) at least some privately contracted IT people to manage the solution.
There's no reason to believe the gov. will make a more robust, scalable and secure solution that other entities.
A better approach might even be to mandate very specific identity protocols, and then allow citizens to chose their own identity provider among those that fit the regulatory requirements and oversight.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Post
It's owned by gov. and effectively independent. They could be an identity provider. They are already close to being able to do whatever need be done.
Having to create new government bureaucracies to do things is hard.
It improves security through the reduction in the scope of harm and eliminating single points of failure. If someone compromises your Candy Crush login they can't drain your bank account.
> and raises the thirst for more intensive surveillance to counter the inefficiency with which the data is used. (Consider the talk after 9/11 on the FBI and CIA not sharing info, and then we get the Patriot Act.)
Your argument in favor of centralized ID is that otherwise nefarious spies will lobby in favor of something equivalent to centralized ID so they can correlate everything? That's the argument against it.
Indeed as you say, a subgroup of the largest Swedish private banks own the ID system in Sweden - for profit, and without any serious democratic oversight.
Edit: I forgot to add that the system allows these private banks to see into almost every aspect of a person’s life: where they shop, where they are, who shares their household and so on. Almost every aspect of a Swede’s life can and is tracked by this system.
Every time someone identifies themselves with this system, it costs the retail merchant or service a non-trivial amount of money. Because it’s effectively a private monopoly, that price is set by the banks, and often involves a lot of secret horse-trading behind closed doors (I’ve been involved with some aspects of this in the past).
The secret negotiations also include terms that are not open to public scrutiny. One example, is that the merchant or service isn’t allowed to blame BankID for any problems such as downtime or any other technical problems.
btw I’m curious how you get all your receipts digitally. There are some services such as Kivra in Sweden, but they definitely don’t cover all stores.
Try to have anything to do with the government without a bank account. The processes and system are today so integrated that many aspect of being a citizen are today impossible beyond giving the power of attorney to someone who do have a bank account and then let them do it. (Not hypothetical as this was the recommendation given by försäkringskassan).
I would be much more happy with the system if the government operated a customer facing bank as a fallback, one which laws dictate so that all citizen critical functions are guarantied without a customer contract between a profit seeking company and a customer. It does not need to deal with loans, or give people interests, or handle stocks or any other aspects usually associated with banks. It just need to do basic banking for which everything else depend on in a cashless and internet based society.
Until then, what we have is the merge of private banks, beholden to non-elected owners, and government. It is very hassle free as long one don't mind the soft version corporatocracy.
It's convenient, but it's an absolute travesty that we've left such an essential part of digital infrastructure to big banks.
The US has an incoherent assemblage of spare parts for an ID system and it's been years since I've seen the inside of a physical bank.
You have bank credentials and use them with with the bank. You have post office credentials and use them with the post office. This is far better from a security and privacy standpoint that any kind of centralized ID. If someone steals your post office credentials they can't drain your brokerage account, ransomware your employer's cloud services in your name and take out a home equity loan against your house and convert it into Bitcoin.
Centralized identity is a bug, not a feature.
Yeah, it really works fine. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to find another bank that didn't want to blackmail me, but the system has such obvious flaws that it shouldn't exist.
To make matters worse, the current chairman of Swedbank is Göran Persson, a previous prime minister. I fear that there is some ugly corruption involved here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Documents_Act_2010
I've been formulating my thinking around it and I'm starting to think that this is some sort of new-age "luddism" at play, coupled with some odd distrust of government for this particular problem, as if government is trustable elsewhere.
The companies (mostly banks and insurances) lobbying for the e-ID have already implemented a similar project called "Swiss-ID" which was supposed to be used across a majority of service providers. From the point of view of the user, it looked and behaved a lot like OAuth.
What I am afraid of is that the e-ID will be implemented in a similar way, and data will be stored centrally. That's a big difference to the classic physical ID we have, because while the government controlled some data centrally (name, year of birth etc), no information about banking or illnesses was ever stored in a central place.
If there was an indication about how the e-ID was going to be implemented, and if there was a reasonable effort to make sure data is being kept isolated (e.g. by issuing a physical tokens and encrypting the data with them) I might have voted yes. But there was no such information, and I expected the worst.
Article 13: Right to Privacy
1. All persons have the right to receive respect for their private and family life, home, and secrecy of the mails and telecommunications.
2. All persons have the right to be protected against the abuse of personal data.
Also the constitution can be only changed by voting.
This should not come as a surprise either, since it's essentially the implementation of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Where it usually goes wrong, is with the interpretation of the words "privacy" and "communication". Also, governments have a habit of defining exceptional situations in which these laws can be violated in the name of some supposedly higher purpose (e.g. national security).
Strictly speaking, the UDHR is rather clear about one thing: the declared human rights are inalienable (meaning, they can neither be taken away nor be given away freely), so all the exceptions are essentially bullshit excuses. Those should not exist in the first place, at least not according to the "inalienably" part of "inalienable human rights".
Additionally, there is no law/treaty that explains why modern technologies should not be subject to Article 12. While plenty of governments/businesses would like to convince people otherwise, almost everything we do online is strictly speaking telecommunication of some sort or another.
The sad truth is that pretty much all of today's online privacy issues are strictly speaking in violation of the UDHR. There is just way too much at stake for businesses and governments alike for them to ever acknowledge it. It doesn't change that they are blatantly violating a treaty they signed, ratified and should be upholding though.
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
One reason for this has broad applicability: Even inalienable human rights can be in conflict with each other. So solutions must weight them against each other, but will ultimately violate one or more of the clashing rights.
The UDHR also recognizes the that even the article 3 "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person" is limited as in so far people may be arrested (and therefore deprived of their freedom) by giving the explicit article 9 "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile." Again, with the arbitrary qualifier.
I believe, recognizing that even these funamental rights clash with each other is important. Often I feel that online discussion have each side pick the one in favor of their position and ignoring that other rights are in conflict with that position.
But as you said, it is also important to recognize that there are bullshit excuses.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
I really wish the US had this. Here, even simple acts like registering to vote or getting a driver license, bank account, credit card means your personal residence gets leaked to spammers, scammers, data brokers, and eventually, stalkers.
There really should be laws saying that personal addresses cannot be given to third parties without explicit, optional, opt-in consent.
Swiss discretion is not only a marketing tactic, it is also a good habit many people keep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
There was so much misinformation around mostly due to lack of technical understanding (e.g. "it's a digital passport!") and the (yellow) press heavily pushed for a yes.
It’s usually free, but there’s also certified email (PEC) that costs from 5€ to 30€ per year. Also required by the government in some cases and also offered by a small number of companies.
Does Estonia offer their digital IDs directly?
Looks like anyone can become an e-resident and apply [1], I'm unsure if this extends to the e-identify cards also or if they're for Estonian nationals only. I remember previously that anyone could apply for one however you had to go to an Embassy to submit information and biometrics.
[0] https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/smart-id [1] https://e-resident.gov.ee/become-an-e-resident/
Some services may offer alternative logins, but my guess is that they’ll be phased out like INPS is phasing out PIN-based logins.
Why?
Every process that currently involves reams of paperwork (like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month - yikes) that can be done digitally instead saves the taxpayer or customer money.
And the Swiss do like their money.
Socialized health care? There's no such thing in Switzerland.
Sure, health insurance is mandatory. No question that it's heavily regulated (i.e. basic insurance can't rule you out or discriminate against you for pre-existing conditions).
But socialized health care? Give me a break.
> like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month
The actual declaration is covered by 4 basic pages. In addition there's a declaration of assets and a couple of helper pages for deductions.
You can download tax declaration software for free (at least in the canton of Zürich) and using it for your declaration takes all of 20 minutes.
It may be a bit more complex if you own real estate, or if some other complexities are involved.
You either don't have a clue or you're massively over-exaggerating for reasons, which elude me.
Tax offices are fully digital since at least 10 years. If you file with paper it‘s scanned and destroyed. Your local tax office receives all the documents digitally. Of course this could vary by canton.
Another example, comparing how digital COVID payments in South Korea were a lot simpler and faster than in paperwork-heavy Japan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/in-virus-...
It has occured to me though that one thing that makes automation and digitalization of society "affordable" by comparison to human labor is -- skimping on security, building this giant house of insecure fragile IT. If we were to actually pay for reliable secure systems we probably couldn't afford the computers-replace-person-hours version either, not sure where that would leave us.
The USA-ians definitely like their money as much as the Swiss.
Most everything being decentralized maybe makes nationwide digitalization slower, but that is crucial aspect of the political system.
Because that is life in Switzerland.
It should allow more security, because digital signature is harder to forge than previous physical securities. But also you could use them more easily in other countries, as it can be read by a computer, and not a human that speaks a finite set of languages.
Lastly, you could use them for authentication for various online and daily services, such as banking, taxes, creation of companies, digital signature,... that are said to save time on logistics.
Yet there are countries running 3072-bit RSA on Infineon chips, because their 3K keys are least broken. Discovery also entailed country-wide certificate revocation, which IIRC happened days if not weeks after the flaws were public, while the law states a digital signature has the same bearing as a physical one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifiers
On the plus side all the lobbyist that were involved in this story have been recalled to order.
So much for the will of the people.
There's actually nothing new here: digital IDs were already a thing, corruption has always been a thing, and the referendum process worked correctly to remind the politicians who is in charge.
No they don't but I can see why you might think that.
ePassports (the ones with the stylised "chip" image on the cover) do have X.509 certificates baked into them. And ePassports do say "We are the government, and this is Jeff" (if you are Jeff) but that's not what the X.509 certificate says.
Each X.509 certificate is one of a relatively small number minted by your government which says "We are the government of country X and this is a public document signing key".
Then the passports all contain raw data (such as a photograph and summary information about their subject) with this certificate and a signature over the raw passport data that can be authenticated with the public signing key.
So there's an X.509 certificate but it isn't for Jeff, and there's data about Jeff, but it isn't in an X.509 certificate.
And they're usually pretty competent, especially the few ones that work for the federal government.
I think you may underestimate the system needed. Identity management is the tip of the iceberg: this needs to tie into any future digital currency, income taxes, property ownership, government benefits, and who knows what else. Any off-the-shelf product will need customization. I’m not saying it can’t be done.... it SHOULD be done. But not in 6 months.
> Identity management is the tip of the iceberg: this needs to tie into any future digital currency, income taxes, property ownership, government benefits, and who knows what else.
I'll put my shoe on my head if you can find me a private company that can do this in six months. Previously on HN: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs (technologyreview.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975110
1167 points by donsupreme 35 days ago
664 comments
And we're talking about Italy, not some first rated technological paradise.
... I mean, as a French citizen who kind of wants my government to keep existing, I also agree with the statement you quote?
Our government's public-facing IT systems have gotten better over the last few years, but my default expectations for any new projects would still be for them to mess it up.
Of course, the problem is I'd also expect the average contractor to mess it up in very similar ways, for similar reasons.
That 1% though, is going to have all the weird edge cases.
There is no way it could be done in 6 months given any reasonable parameters you care to throw at it.
So, like the US?
It's has all the modern postulates of liberty & governance that most countries are striving for without the "scam orchestration"
It also make any change, for the good or the bad, very very slow, which can be frustrating at times. So if stability is not high up on your list of life’s values it might not be the best place to be.
Do you admire denying women the vote until the end of the 20th century?
I've been seriously considering leaving the USA permanently because I'm having a difficult time reconciling my morals and ideals with the taxes I pay. Ballots and debates aren't enough. I'd rather vote with my taxes and my feet, and start helping a county I believe in.
I agree there should be safeguards against a rogue or even non-rogue person modifying these records to hurt someone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
my bad !
I will elaborate and be "more thoughtful and substantive" as written in the guidelines, next time
I didn't know where to place the cursor, since the issue was inherently politic and not about technology, as the article states
But this article deserved political comments, nonetheless
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/vote-march-4--2018_att...
It's understandable people fear Google/FB etc., but an entity contracted by the state to do digital ID services is not going to be selling your phone number if doing so would put them out of business and land them in jail.
Sadly, the notion of basic digital ID would be very useful for so many things and maybe even help with privacy if content providers switched to this kind id vs. social logins.
Ironically, these 'government IDs' may be a vanguard in the fight for privacy because they establish a privacy-based alternative that doesn't currently exist.
(Edit) There are already private institutions that manage ID data (Finance, Health) no our behalf and generally we are not concerned. (Although VISA is owned by banks and that's a concern). In Canada, they have temporarily allocated ID literally to the banking system - you can login to the gov. tax portal using your banking login. So, de-facto, the banks provide ID services to gov. already.
It's irrational populism. ID services are sensitive obviously, but governments already deal in such types of sensitive information and there's no reason 3rd parties can't manage those services with the right kind of oversight.
It's as though citizens have no understanding of how contracts, oversight and regulations work.
If the government requires certain parameters to be kept, they will be.
The notion that these ID providers are going to 'abuse the data' is conspiratorially absurd to the extent that basic information control is written into the process.
If the financial incentives for 'abuse' don't exist, then really it's a matter of operational capability and pragmatism, in which case, private sector is an ok choice, just as it is for so many other things.
The government could feasibly do it, but there's no reason it can't be outsourced.
It's a bit short-sighted.
