Swiss intelligence service held back on internet surveillance

KEYSTONE/© KEYSTONE / CHRISTIAN BEUTLER

The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service (FIS) does not know how far it can go with its internet surveillance operations due to a lack of clear guidelines.

An unpublished report by the independent intelligence watchdog AS-Rens identifies organisational problems in the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) section of the FIS, reports the NZZ am Sonntag. This includes the division that could have stopped the perpetrator of the anti-Semitic attack in Zurich last week.

According to the report, it is not clear when FIS employees can freely obtain information from the Internet and when external authorisation is required. There are “no criteria or structured guidelines on what OSINT is and the limits of the OSINT legal framework”, reads the report’s executive summary.

Last Saturday at around 9.30pm, a 50-year-old Orthodox Jewish man was stabbed on the street near the centre of Switzerland’s biggest city, Zurich. The alleged attacker, a 15-year-old with Tunisian origins – he became a Swiss citizen in 2011 – was arrested at the scene after passers-by chased him and pinned him down until police arrived.

The police confirmed the authenticity of an online video in which the teenager declared allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) and called for a “global war against Jews”; he also said he wanted to “storm a synagogue” and “kill unbelievers on the street”.

Adapted from German by DeepL/ac

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