The Swiss digital identity (e-ID) has been under public scrutiny since its narrowly approved referendum. Public trust in a secure, government-provided digital identity is considered the foundation of the project. However, it has emerged that the federal administration was secretly pursuing an outsourcing strategy for this critical infrastructure. As the magazine Republik reveals, the Federal Office of Justice and the Federal Office for Information Technology and Telecommunication planned to contract Amazon Web Services (AWS) for key tasks related to the e-ID trust infrastructure in the spring.
According to the report, the planned involvement of the US hyperscaler concerned a core component of the system: the trust infrastructure, which ensures the authenticity of digital IDs and the authorization of requesting companies and authorities. This includes the basic register, which manages the status of an e-ID in anonymized form, as well as the publicly accessible trust register for authorized issuers and verification services.
AWS apparently convinced the authorities primarily due to the extremely high reliability of its data centers, which must be guaranteed around the clock. Since the agreed-upon state cloud infrastructure is delayed, IT managers saw using existing framework agreements with international providers as a pragmatic solution. The Federal Office of Justice confirmed to Republik that all technical options had been examined as part of the preparatory work.
Emergency brake in the Ministry of Justice
The plan ultimately failed due to a veto by Justice Minister Beat Jans. The Social Democrat personally halted the project in mid-February 2026, stating that awarding the contract to a US IT giant would contradict the goals of digital sovereignty. As a US corporation, Amazon is subject to laws such as the Cloud Act, which would have facilitated access by overseas authorities to infrastructures. Furthermore, contracts with such providers pose significant risks to state operational capability.
Analyses by the online magazine of existing cloud framework agreements with Amazon reveal significant dependencies. The agreements are essentially standardized templates rather than tailored arrangements for government needs.
In these agreements, Amazon reserves the right to unilaterally modify technical foundations. In the event of system failures, the company’s liability is very limited. If the contract is terminated, the administration has only a 90-day window to migrate all data, which would be nearly impossible for a critical state infrastructure. Added to this are political risks such as the theoretical shutdown of the infrastructure due to sanctions or geopolitical decisions by the US government.
Political outrage and open questions
The revelation of the original awarding plans triggered sharp criticism from Swiss politicians and civil rights organizations. Industry experts and parliamentarians pointed out that the e-ID referendum was won precisely on the promise of managing sensitive citizen data strictly independently of Big Tech companies.
The prevented Amazon outsourcing is part of a series of unresolved challenges. In addition to data protection concerns, such as those related to the querying of insurance numbers or a lack of technical restrictions, developments in the field of AI are causing concern among observers. Deepfakes are making the online identification process more difficult, leading civil society and digital associations to demand reliable offline registration methods. Furthermore, compatibility with the EU’s eID system (EUDI) is not provided in the initial version. The Swiss federal government has therefore postponed the planned launch of the e-ID to the first half of 2027.
(mki)
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This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.