Sharp rise in official surveillance of Swiss telecommunications
Telecommunications monitoring measures, carried out by the authorities mainly to investigate serious crimes, increased by 27% last year mostly due to an increase in mobile phone antenna searches.
The number of real-time monitoring measures increased to 1,218 in 2022 compared to 1,055 the previous year. Retrospective monitoring of communications up to six months rose from 6,265 to 8,114 in 2022, the Post and Telecommunications Monitoring Service revealed on Friday.
+ Surveillance: the exception has become the rule
This rise in surveillance is due above all to the sharp increase in the number of mobile phone antenna searches, which almost doubled in one year.
“A third of all surveillance measures (real-time and retrospective surveillance) were ordered to investigate property crime. A quarter of the measures were carried out to identify serious violations of the Narcotics Act and almost 9% for emergency searches,” an official statementExternal link said.
Only around 5% of measures involved offences relating to physical injury or unlawful detention. Communications surveillance measures are mainly ordered to investigate serious crimes. They can be ordered either by the prosecution authorities or by the Federal Intelligence Service (FIS). Once approved, they are implemented by the Post and Telecommunications Monitoring Service.
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