Federal Act
on the Intelligence Service
(Intelligence Service Act, IntelSA)

¹ The Head of the DDPS may au­thor­ise the fol­low­ing per­sons to be provided with an ali­as iden­tity, i.e. be giv­en an iden­tity oth­er than their true iden­tity in or­der to en­sure their safety or fa­cil­it­ate in­form­a­tion gath­er­ing:

a.

FIS em­ploy­ees;

b.

in con­sulta­tion with or at the re­quest of the can­ton, em­ploy­ees of the can­ton­al ex­ec­ut­ive au­thor­it­ies act­ing in terms of a fed­er­al man­date;

c.

hu­man sources in the course of a spe­cif­ic op­er­a­tion.

² The ali­as iden­tity may be used for as long as re­quired to en­sure the safety of the per­son con­cerned or fa­cil­it­ate in­form­a­tion gath­er­ing. Use is sub­ject to the fol­low­ing time lim­its:

a.

for em­ploy­ees of the FIS or of can­ton­al se­cur­ity agen­cies: a max­im­um of five years; if re­quired, this peri­od may be ex­ten­ded for a max­im­um of three fur­ther years in any giv­en case;

b.

for hu­man sources: a max­im­um of twelve months; if re­quired, this peri­od may be ex­ten­ded for a max­im­um of twelve fur­ther months in any giv­en case.

³ The use of an ali­as iden­tity to gath­er in­form­a­tion is only per­mit­ted for a pur­pose set out in Art­icle 6 para­graph 1 and where:

a.

at­tempts to gath­er in­form­a­tion without us­ing an ali­as iden­tity have been un­suc­cess­ful, would have no pro­spect of suc­cess without the use of an ali­as iden­tity or would be dis­pro­por­tion­ately more dif­fi­cult; or

b.

there is a threat to a sig­ni­fic­ant leg­al in­terest such as the life and limb or phys­ic­al in­teg­rity of the per­son re­quired to gath­er the in­form­a­tion or of a per­son closely as­so­ci­ated with that per­son.

⁴ In or­der to de­vel­op and main­tain a cov­er story, the FIS may pro­duce or al­ter iden­tity doc­u­ments, of­fi­cial doc­u­ments and oth­er doc­u­ments as well as per­son­al de­tails. The re­spons­ible fed­er­al, can­ton­al and com­mun­al au­thor­it­ies are re­quired to co­oper­ate with the FIS.

⁵ The FIS shall take the re­quired meas­ures to pro­tect the per­son’s true iden­tity from be­ing re­vealed.