Switzerland is mostly a privacy snake oil in regards to the coercive powers of various legal authorities. Your executives, investors etc are all subject to US law. Swiss law isn't going to protect users.<p>Switzerland might be a reasonable place to stage civil disobedience from. Phil has credibility in that regard. Would love to see a statement from Silent Circle comparable to Least Authority's <a href="https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-October/005353.html" rel="nofollow">https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-October/0053...</a>
"Today, his biggest worry is not software backdoors, but the petabytes (1m gigabytes) of information being hoarded by the likes of Google and Facebook. “If you collect all that data, it becomes an attractive nuisance. It’s kind of a siren calling out inviting someone to come and try to get it. Governments say that if private industry can have it, why can’t our intelligence agencies have it?”<p>I am hoping if enough people stop using these two services; they might start deleting information permanently? I know Google is hard to give up, but I don't think they need to keep everything. As to Facebook, I can't see any reason, other than business, as to why they keep every bit of information we put up there--forever.
"Today, email can be routinely and automatically scanned for interesting keywords, on a vast scale, without detection. This is like driftnet fishing."<p>-- Phil Zimmermann, 1991
The last time I looked into it, all SilentCircle had was a small sales office in the French part. No engineering, marketing, etc... just a secretary and a sales guy.<p>I'd be surprised if they move anything substantial besides their servers to Switzerland. It's increasingly difficult for non-europeans to get residence permits here. I doubt Phil, Jon Callas, etc are anywhere near Switzerland, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.<p>As for Switzerland being a 'privacy snakeoil', that's wrong. Privacy rules (especially financial) are strict and followed by the government, unlike in the u.s. There are definitely surveillance operations, for example, the satellite communication program that uncovered the CIA rendition programs, but these are mostly directly outward.