The Italian Minister of Justice, Carlo Nordio, recently spoke on the greatest instrument of political pressure the judiciary has at its disposal: wiretapping. The topic is sensitive, as the various Italian political factions have been arguing lately about the legitimacy of using, or not using, wiretapping in so many investigations. These are delicate days when the last Italian Mafia boss, Messina Denaro, was caught (they say) thanks to wiretapping. It took 30 years, but it is a fact. Quite rightly, the Minister has cleared up any doubts about those on mafia and terrorism: they will not be eliminated, without any doubt.
The question is: is the almost constant use of wiretapping for all hypotheses where the edict limit of the investigated crime allows it? To date, this approach results in a massive flow of information in the archives of the judicial police and the judiciary that, in some hypotheses, can lead to personal catastrophes when conversations are made public to the media. In practice, on wiretapping, the game is again being played between powers of the State that should not arm wrestle each other: politics and the judiciary.
Political and technological issues
This is because the relationship between the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the media has become very close over the last thirty years, from Operation Clean Hands onwards, and the private conversations of public figures, politicians, entrepreneurs, sportsmen, etc., are prized game for those on the hunt for news. The Minister of Justice is right, therefore, to want to limit the use of wiretapping and computer tapping (the latter being extremely invasive), where they are not a necessary resource for investigations.
The Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, has talked about corrective measures to distortions and dialogue with the judiciary: the latter is composed, for the overwhelming majority, of severe and upright people, who should not be assimilated to those who, for ambition or political position, intend their work as a show of arrests (to obtain; as a result, perhaps, full acquittal sentences, as happened – often – to some magistrates known to the chronicles).
We are all (possible) hackers
During a hearing for the cognitive investigation on wiretapping in Italy at the Senate, the President of the Privacy Guarantor, Pasquale Stanzione, stated that “it would be appropriate to prohibit the use of capturing devices capable of modifying the content of the host device and erasing the traces of the operations carried out”, suggested Stanzione, pointing out that ‘the recourse to systems – apps or, in any case, software that are not inoculated directly on the host-device, but downloaded from platforms freely accessible to all and, on the other hand, storage through cloud systems in servers located outside the national territory – could, therefore, be subject to a specific prohibition’.
The President of the Guarantor Authority’s intervention on data retention is clear: the cloud, the acclaimed archiving tool that allows admirable savings for those who use it – is. In fact, someone’s computer (or server). This someone should be the Italian State, in its articulation of the Ministry of Justice, and not a private entity located in a foreign State, where, most likely, the E.U. Regulation 16/679 (G.D.P.R.) does not apply.
Some scandals concerning proven companies supplying hardware and software in 2021 turned the spotlight on the use of Chinese technology for eavesdropping and vide-surveillance operations, with the abstract possibility of remote access (i.e. from China) to the data captured and stored. Not only that: spyware, i.e. the virus politely called ‘computer capturer’, often and willingly alters the device on which it is installed. In other words, eavesdropping with the computer capturer is an actual hacker attack. And nobody wants to be eavesdropped on by a hacker, of course.
