VÜPF 2.0: The Federal Council declares 9 million Swiss citizens under general suspicion.

An ordinary driver going the wrong way might eventually turn on the radio, hear the traffic report, and realize that the hundred honking cars in the oncoming lane might actually be right. The Federal Council honks back. Despite a consultation process that resembled a collective vote of no confidence, despite more than 15,000 petition signatures , despite warnings from business, academia, and half of Europe, Bern stubbornly clings to the revision of the surveillance ordinance (VÜPF) – and continues to call the preventive, comprehensive registration of its own population a "technical adjustment."

In early May, it became public what the Federal Department of Justice, headed by Federal Councillor Beat Jans, had been circulating behind closed doors since February: a revised draft of the Ordinance on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (VÜPF), sent to a handful of select IT companies, bypassing the public and civil society. The magazine "Republik" leaked the secret document and enshrined its verdict in its headline: The Federal Council has learned nothing. The Digital Society put it even more bluntly: The Federal Council's reckless course must finally be stopped before it wrecks fundamental rights, the economy, and society alike.

A vote of no confidence as background noise
As a reminder: The first version of the revision managed the feat in the summer of 2025 of uniting all participants in the consultation process against it – except for the cantons, whose public prosecutors' offices had ultimately ordered the data buffet for themselves. All political parties were against it, the business associations against it, the academic community against it, and so on. an international alliance of 19 digital rights organizations, which Bern reminded in an open letter that indiscriminate mass surveillance conflicts with the jurisprudence of European courts. A Petition He compared the plans to surveillance laws like those known from Russia, China, or Iran. In any functioning democracy, this would be the moment when a project is buried. In Bern, it's the moment when they change their stationery.

Cosmetics for the control apparatus
Because what the leaked draft contains as "improvements" is merely cosmetic work on the same bunker. The threshold for surveillance obligations has been raised from 5000 to 100,000 customers – a sleight of hand that spares smaller providers and hits the real targets all the more precisely: Proton, Threema, and all the others who have built their business model on the scandalous concept of not spying on their users. The core remains untouched. Mandatory user identification, data retention for months, standardized official inquiries at the push of a button. Anyone who communicates is recorded because they might be relevant to some investigation at some point. The presumption of innocence is not restricted, but rather reversed: general suspicion as the state's operating system.

The exodus is already priced in.
The consequences are not mere speculation, but rather a predictable business decision. Proton CEO Andy Yen has repeatedly made it clear that his company will leave Switzerland should the revision come into effect in its current form. Other IT companies, such as Nym, are also openly threatening to relocate.A regulatory impact assessment now quantifies the damage in concrete terms: By 2035, annual revenue losses of around 10 billion Swiss francs and cumulative tax losses of approximately 7 billion are expected.Ironically, the very companies that provided Switzerland with a new export commodity after the demise of banking secrecy – trust – are now to be reduced to auxiliary sheriffs by decree. While Sunday speeches drip with talk of innovation and digital sovereignty, the administration is busy undermining the only competitive advantage that cannot be copied in Singapore.

The bypass is called the Ordinance
The chosen approach is particularly revealing. An expansion of state surveillance on this scale should have been put before parliament and ultimately before the people. Instead, everything is being done through regulations, bypassing the legislature, drafted by the very surveillance agency that is allowed to define its own powers in the draft legislation. Even within the center-right, there was an attempt to pull the emergency brake – FDP National Councillor Johanna Gapany submitted a motion demanding a fundamental overhaul. Brussels has responded with the Chat control They've shown how to repackage mass surveillance until resistance wears thin. Bern has apparently taken note and refined the principle: no vote, no debate, just a PDF circulating in selected mailboxes. Anyone who thinks this is related to the remaining pieces of the digital surveillance state puzzle Putting it all together, one recognizes the pattern: seamless recording, sold as security, introduced as a formality.

End of the line: general suspicion
The Federal Council, meanwhile, earnestly insists that this is by no means about mass surveillance. An assurance worth about as much as a driver going the wrong way on a highway promising they'll only be driving on the wrong side for a short while. Whether the state itself collects the data or forces private providers to do so is a purely academic distinction for those being monitored. The question is no longer whether this revision goes too far, but why a government is pushing through a project against the united opposition of its own country—a project that shreds fundamental rights, destroys billions, and simultaneously discards the last vestiges of trust in institutions. Switzerland buried banking secrecy under external pressure—now it is voluntarily burying digital correspondence secrecy on its own. Bern is building the surveillance state by decree and calling it "legal certainty." When the last data protection companies pack their containers for overseas destinations, the federal government in Bern will be speaking with concern about a problem with Switzerland's competitiveness. And the electorate, who were never asked, then have to pay for the wreckage of this reckless driving – who even honks their horn when the driver has the whole country in their car?!