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The Italian wiretapping scandal has continued since this summer, showing that Telecom Italia internal security service has tapped phone calls from their own employees, business partners, competition, but also from political and football circles.

The wiretapped phone calls database was apparently used to blackmail various people. According to a prosecutor that is investigating the case the obtained funds were used for corruption activities. The wiretapping was possible due to a series of accomplices from the Police, Prosecutors and Secret services.

The Italian Government issued last week a new normative act on "wiretapping" that tries to prevent the usage of the wiretapped conversations in any court cases. The new decree even condemns the possession of illegal wiretapping information. The Prime Minister has declared that "The objective is to at least stop the rot spreading. We want to ensure that no wave of blackmail can begin. That would make the attack on democracy even more serious."

Also, the Italian Ministry of Justice, Clemente Mastella, ordered an investigation regarding the Telecom Italia procedures on wiretapping and to check out whether these procedures allow unauthorized access. The final report should be shared with the lawmakers.

The Italian Data Protection Commission (Garante per la protezione dei dati personali) issued a new press release on 21 September making a public call to every citizen, media and other public entities to respect privacy if they have documents or information regarding the content of the wiretapped conversations.

The chaotic way in which the public authorities have dealt with the situation is underlined in several articles that show the state institutions have reacted very late and only when their leaders' personal interests might have been at stake.

Andrea Monti from EDRI-member ALCEI has correctly underlined that the Italian Data Protection Commission, which should have controlled this market has only "succeeded" in sending a press release. He also points out that, contrary to the most spread common opinions that the "hackers", "pirates" and "direct marketing multinational companies" are those targeting our personal data, the authors of the biggest problems related to the misuse of information are actually insiders, not very technical, such as members of the Police and Information Services.

Garante: nobody to publish the contents of the illegal files (only in Italian, 21.09.2006)
http://www.garanteprivacy.it/garante/doc.jsp?ID=1340198

Decree-Law no. 259/ 22 September 2006, Emergency provisions for the modification of the norm regarding the wiretapping (only in Italian, 22.09.2006)
http://www.interlex.it/testi/dl06_259.htm

Eight Years of Abuses and Garante issues a press release (only in Italian, 25.09.2006)
http://www.interlex.it/675/amonti86.htm

Illegal Wiretapping and files: quis custodiet custodes? (only in Italian, 25.09.2006)
http://www.interlex.it/675/telecom.htm

Justice minister seeks information about wiretapping at Telecom Italia amid
scandal (23.09.2006) http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/09/23/europe/EU_GEN_Italy_Wiretapp...