[wilhelmtux-discussion] TR : [wsis com-ch] Pour info - surveillancedes emails en suisse - Let's be good citizens

Dietrich Feist dietrich.feist at mw.iap.unibe.ch
Mit Mar 26 12:07:28 CET 2003


Hi Claude,

> As from April 1st, Swiss ISP's will have to save all our e-mails and
> tracks of our browsing for 6 months. However, the article below points
> out that they won't be able to save the content of our web-e-mails

Sorry, I have to correct you: it is not true that Swiss ISP will have to
save all our email from April 1. The relevant article of the law (in
German) is here:

http://www.admin.ch/ch/d/sr/780_11/index.html

Articles 24 h clearly states that ISP only have to keep traffic
information like date and time of sent and received emails, SMTP
envelope (not header!) information, and IP adresses of the
receiving/sending system. In clear text: they have to keep their SMTP
logs for six months. Mail headers or content will not be kept this way.

More information will only have to be provided or stored if a person is
under surveillance by the authorities. In this case, the ISP has to
provide traffic information along with header and content. Such
surveillance measures are only possible within a criminal inverstigation
against individual suspects. I assume that you certainly need a court
order for that.

To make this very clear: the ISP has no obligation to provide anything
but the traffic information listed in Art. 24 f-h for the time period
before the surveillance measure starts. Therefore, there is no need to
store header or content information of emails for all customers.

Kind regards,

Dietrich