Italy, Wikileaks and the disappearing journalism

As every country with “something to hide”, Italy (better, the Italian government) is concerned of what might be soon disclosed on Wikileaks.

As a preemptive strike against possible Wikileaks’ fallback yesterday an official press-release said – without explicitly mentioning Assanges’ website – that “the forthcoming pubblication of confidential reports about the USA politics, with possible negative side effects on Italy tooo – imposes a though determination to defend the Italian reputation as well the protection of economic and political interests of the country” (the translation is mine, I apologize for any mistake.)

I bet my ten cents that when the Italian File will be disclosed the first reaction will be to call for a new law to control the flow of information that endanger “national security” or whatever they name it.

Another interesting issue to remark is the (non)role of the Italian journalists in the whole story. It is, at least, odd that a remote-located website news service, with no apparent connection with the country, is able to get sensitive information about the Italian government, while the local journalists – and especially those who write about politics – don’t.

This is a bad blow to the role of the press as powers’ watchdog.

EU:a State-approved professional to connect a router to a socket? Italy already got it

The “discovery” that Italy is going to enforce the EU directive 2008/63/CE by imposing that only a State-approved professional can connect a router to a socket has generated some sort of ? hype among those who’re not familiar with the Italian legal system. Since 1992, in fact, ? the decree of the Ministry of communication n.314 already establish such burden (and sanction those who don’t comply.)

The true news is that – should the government actually revise the old regulation – things can only get worse…

Amazon.it to infringe Italian data protection law?

I’m an old Amazon.com customer and I’m very happy that the Company finally landed in Italy.
It is odd, nevertheless, that Amazon.it’s data protection policy (informativa sul trattamento dei dati personali) is not fully compliance with the Italian Data Protection Code, since mandatory information are missed:
– the identity of the data controller (responsabile del trattamento)
– how long will Amazon handle the personal data
– what will happen when the data handling is no more necessary
– the rights belonging to the data subject (diritti dell’interessato) under sect. 7-13 of the Italian Data Protection Code
Further more Amazon.it’s privacy procedure fails to collect the explicit consent of the data subject for the data processing and didn’t collect the specific consent to handle the sensitive data (those related to customers who purchase political, philosophical, and/or healt-related books.)
This situation, then, poses an interesting question: is Amazon.it actually infringing its customer personal privacy rights?
Strictly speaking, the answer is yes because the law has been breached. Nevertheless I’ll keep purchasing books through Amazon services since I feel more protected by Amazon ethical commitment than by a bunch of legal lingo.
Fact is that bureaucracy asks for its lamb to be sacrificed.
🙂