Report to police, Italian ISPs told
p2pnet.net News:- Italian ISPs must now "monitor, control and report to Police authorities their customers and are subject to stiff fines of they don’t actively do it," says ALCEI (Electronic Frontiers Italy).
This follows a March 12 ‘decree-law’ issued by the Italian government that’s a "messy and poisonous mixture of unrelated issues, treating peer-to-peer sharing of music, video or software with criteria that were conceived to fight terrorism," states ALCEI.
"The result is useless, ineffective and dangerous."
The music industry has been able to buy its way into legislation in the US under which the FBI works as a record label enforcement unit and as soon as the Italian ruling is in place, DIGOS (roughly the Italian equivalent of the FBI) will add to its key role of dealing with organized crime, terrorism and the safety of state, says ALCEI.
"The decree-law issued by the Italian government on March 12, 2004 adds to an already long list of laws and rules that, with a variety of pretexts, interfere with freedom and personal rights," it says, going on:
"Its alleged purpose is to ‘urgently intervene on matters of cultural goods and properties’. It does nothing that relates to such objectives – and of course there is no ‘urgency’, except for the government’s desire to put the rules in place before they are discussed in parliament.
"The original draft of this decree included some of the messy rulings on data retention that had been placed in the December 24, 2003 decree (that became a law on February 26, 2004, with a few mild amendments in parliament that don’t change its substance – see the ALCEI statement on that matter.) They were removed before the new decree was issued.
"Repressive regulation now comes from another angle: unnecessary and improper ‘innovation’ on the already distorted and warped legislation on copyright. Introducing additional restrictions and violations of personal and human rights."
The decree-law will be extremely useful to the music industry as it continues to bully and buy its way into laws which enable it position itself as the dominant online ‘product’ supplier.
However, the ruling won’t do much for the purpose for which it was ostensibly intended "because it does not provide any useful tool for the prevention of serious crime (such as terrorism and violence)".
Moreover, "It’s ineffective because it’s cumbersome and poorly conceived, therefore likely to produce dispersion of energies, uncontrolled persecution of innocent people, overloading of inquires with no sense or purpose, cluttering of police proceedings and already overburdened law courts, getting in the way of any useful activities for the persecution and prevention of serious crime," ALCEI goes on.
"It’s dangerous because it introduces, in matters where it’s totally unacceptable, the persecution of ‘intention"’, whereby people can be punished not for hat they have done, but for what is assumed they might "intend" to do. (If such a violation of basic human rights and principles of law can, sometimes, be admissible in the case of extreme violence, such as terrorism, it’s obviously intolerable that it be extended to situations where there is no danger for the life and safety of people and institutions).
"Like many other such laws it reveals, in the redundancies of its text, a specific desire to control the internet and interfere with the freedom of people using communication networks. The absurdity and the repressive purpose of this decree are revealed also by specific rulings.
"The original draft of this decree included, for the first time in Italian legislation, restrictions on encryption. We shall not know, until the decree is formally published, if they will be present in the final text. So we must withhold our comments on this point for the time being – though the sheer fact that such an option was considered is an unhealthy symptom."
April 12th, 2004 at 8:45 pm
Viva Italia? Italy is becoming a police nation. Get that Berlusconi out of there.