What's novel about this case is that at least the electorate really did get a vote on the specific subject. What's also interesting is that the result was quite close - to the extent that only 8% change would switch the result. It's my opinion that the current raft of surveillance legislation is actually a major constitutional change, and as such, should require way more than 50% vote, plus public transparency for the cost/benefit to be openly published. Of course, you never get that for these "security" things, it's always, trust us, it's for you own good. To be fair, the Swiss proposals do seem to be mainly for legalising individual warranted surveillance which they weren't previously legally able to do - it's not the blanket surveillance conducted illegally and unconstitutionally by other nations. It's also chilling that it mentioned that the Swiss authorities had been dependent on getting leads from their "partners", who had no such scruples, but it vividly illustrates the outflanking that many nations do (again illegally) against their own subjects using 3rd party "friends". A further problem with this is that those "friends" can exert huge pressure (threat of cutting off the information feed), if, as in Germany, attempts are made to reign in the BND or give Snowden asylum.
I only saw this story yesterday ( The Guardian ) and the result puzzles me . The Swiss get to vote on proposed new legislation to a far greater extent than in most other countries . It could be argued that this is a more direct form of democracy than electing a representative , who traditionally will not care too much about people's opinions until election time comes around. ( I wonder what the admin costs of the Swiss system run to ? ) So this vote is not unusual in itself , but I would have expected it to be a much closer call. A significant proportion of the population ( > 65% ) chose to have more surveillance of themselves , in a country were violent crime ( or street crime ) is already incredibly low .... it's a little baffling .
The way I read it was that they were legislating for warranted probable-cause surveillance, which they'd been doing via the back-door with their foreign buddies anyway. In this case, it's not the blanket (and extremely-dangerous-to-the-innocent) mass surveillance and mass hacking powers that the UK and US governments seem to want. I'm a supporter of warranted probable-cause surveillance, coupled with adequate challenge and remedy. Public laws, rule of law. Ignore that at your country's peril.