Criminals in Italy are increasingly
making phone calls over the internet in order to avoid getting caught
through mobile phone intercepts, police say.
[news.bbc.co.uk] Officers in Milan say organised crime, arms and drugs
traffickers, and prostitution rings are turning to Skype in order to
frustrate investigators. The police say Skype’s encryption system is a secret which the company refuses to share with the authorities. Investigators have become increasingly reliant on wiretaps in recent years. Customs and tax police in Milan have sounded the alarm.
They overheard a suspected cocaine trafficker telling an
accomplice to switch to Skype in order to get details of a 2kg (4.4lb)
drug consignment.
Use of wiretaps by prosecutors in Italy has grown exponentially in recent years.
Heated debate
Investigators say intercepts of telephone calls have become an
essential tool of the police, who spend millions of dollars each year
tracking down crime through wiretaps of landlines and mobile phones.
But the law may be about to change.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing government has
drawn up a bill which would restrict police wiretaps to only the most
serious crimes.
Much crime reporting in the Italian media is based on leaks of
wiretaps and leading politicians, including Mr Berlusconi himself, have
found to their embarrassment that details of their private telephone
conversations have sometimes been leaked to newspapers.
Under the new law reporting of details of criminal
investigations obtained through wiretaps would become illegal until a
final verdict has been delivered.
Given the extreme slowness of Italian justice, this would mean
that details of cases now before the courts might be reported by the
press only in 15 years time.
Not only have Italian journalists been protesting at the new
draft bill, but a heated debate is also going on about it within the
country’s highest body for the administration of justice – the supreme
council of the magistrature, composed of the country’s top judges.
