Citizen movement campaigns to curb social detectives

The deployment of ‘social detectives’ to track welfare fraudsters is nothing new in Switzerland. But since the passing of a law granting the investigators more powers, an unprecedented citizen movement has emerged in protest. It began on Twitter. On March 16, soon after a parliamentary decision granted wide snooping powers to welfare detectives, author Sibylle Berg tweeted her disgust and asked what could be done. Dimitri Rougy, a young Social Democrat activist from Interlaken, quickly replied with a simple “I would help!” A day later, the team expanded to four – plus a coder – and a website was created. After a week, almost 12,000 pledges of support were collected. Finally, on April 5, the official referendum campaign was launched in Bern. The scale and speed of the movement is “something that Switzerland has never seen before”, Rougy reckons. The quartet, who didn’t meet face-to-face until a week after the campaign began, had set at 5,000 the threshold of online ...