Silenced - Italy
21/09/2003
Italy
Protection of the traditional press from censorship has
legally been extended to the Internet (via law 62/2001), forbidding the seizure
of a Web site in the same way that it is forbidden to seize a newspaper.
However, the Court of Rome refused to recognise this interpretation (even
though it has been sustained by the Milan and Latina courts), and allowed the
shutting down of a Web site publishing a “personal advertisement” suspected of
hiding prostitution activities. The ad was published in the same manner as it
would have been in a print newspaper.
The Italian Ministry of Communications engaged as a
consultant a Catholic priest who had previously led an anti-child pornography
NGO that hired “hackers” to shut down “nasty” Web sites. This has raised strong
criticism and concerns from the Italian civil rights movement.
Italian Cybercafes arbitrarily demand passports or photo ID
from customers, details of which are recorded alongside logging data,
prospectively for use by law enforcement authorities.
The Ministry of Communications also recently took over the
Italian Internet Domain Name Authority. It has announced its intention to
create a public foundation, expected in May 2003, which will provide domain
registration services. Unconfirmed rumours claim that law enforcement bodies
may be members of the board or, at least, involved in the foundation.
In 2002, the Italian government made IT security a major
priority and it established a National Security Committee (NSC) charged with
dealing with all Internet-related matters. The committee members come from
academic, military and legal disciplines, and the specific Internet-related
skills vary widely among the membership. Civil rights NGOs have been neither
involved nor invited to public hearings. The results of NSC activities have not
yet been published and it is unknown whether material will be published in the
future.
Copyright laws, which already prohibit the independent
analysis of security and protection methods used in Italy, and which contain
provisions similar to the US DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are
expected to become more stringent.
In October 2001, the Italian Government enacted Decree No.
374/2001, later confirmed by Law No. 438/2001, as part of its fight against
terrorism. The law allows for government agencies in cases involving national
security to intercept communications without a court order.
With regard to cybercrime, no court has published official
evidence of trials and prosecutions regarding online terrorism or Web site
hacking. This is despite the reality that a number of cases have arisen
involving child-pornography, lurkers, and copyright infringement. Although a
large number of people were involved, no serious evidence has been provided. A
serious concern has been raised by the use of computer forensic software based
on proprietary licensing to collect and analyse digital evidence to present in
court, but this has yet to be considered by the public authorities. Because of
the proprietary nature of the software, defence lawyers are unable to carefully
check the way the evidence has been handled by law enforcement bodies before
trial. Italy is a member of the Council of Europe and has signed the Council of
Europe’s Cybercrime Convention.
There is a basic absence of input from the several public
authorities intended to protect privacy, including the Antitrust Authority,
Communications Authority, and Data Protection Commission. The first two were
active only in the field of telecommunications voice services. The Data
Protection Commission has done little more than issue a generic statement about
the need to avoid sacrificing privacy to protect an undefined “public
security”, and release a position paper about spam, e-mail, and online user
profiling. It still has not enacted important, long-awaited measures like the
self-regulation of ISPs.
References
International Telecommunications
Union statistics report, 2001
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/
People online in Italy
http://gandalf.it/data/data3.htm
Andrea Monti, Hacker contro pedofili: crociata o istigazione
a delinquere? 3 December 1998
http://www.interlex.it/regole/amonti20.htm
http://www.ictlaw.net/internal.php?sez=art&IdT=1&IdTA=4&IdA=35
ALCEI-EFI - Electronic Frontier Italy “Internet Providers
and responsibility in the community legislation”
http://www.alcei.it/english/actions/provider.htm
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