The growing suspicion in recent days, recently dispelled by the Italian government, that the state secret service had used Paragon spyware to eavesdrop on a journalist and an activist brought to mind Juvenal’s eternal question – who controls the controllers? – but with the need for reformulation: who controls the suppliers of the controllers? by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by La Repubblica-Italian Tech Continue reading “Paragon and Meta: the spectre of surveillance and the phantom of democracy”
The TikTok ruling and the future of Chinese high-tech multinationals
The recent decision of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in the TikTok case confirms the validity of the law mandating the forced sale of the US subsidiary of the Chinese social networking giant, sets an important precedent in the relationship between rights and national security, and provides a fairly precise idea of how state control over foreign companies, not only Chinese, will evolve by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by Formiche.net Continue reading “The TikTok ruling and the future of Chinese high-tech multinationals”
Who will save us from technological profiling?
Equalize, the scandal that is filling the newsfeed of these hours re-proposes all the issues posed by similar events that have happened in Italy and abroad, and in particular, highlights three of them: the ‘loyalty’ of the civil servants entrusted with the power to enter the citizen’s lives, the involvement of private entities in the provision of technological services to critical apparatuses of the State, the need to ‘cut angles’ or to practice ‘plausible deniability’ on the part of institutions, companies and subjects in top positions even in private sectors – by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Strategikon – Italian Tech – La Repubblica
Continue reading “Who will save us from technological profiling?”
Why did Apple drop the lawsuit against the Israeli company behind the Pegasus spyware?
Cupertino’s reasons, experts‘ doubts and an issue that once again puts users’ rights at the centre in the confrontation between Big Tech and Sovereign States by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Strategikon – Italian Tech La Repubblica
Allegations against Pavel Durov call into question Big Tech’s stay in Europe
The publication of a press release by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office on the arrest of Pavel Durov allowsus to delve a little more (but not too much) into the context of the affair because it contains the list of charges brought against the founder of Telegram.
To summarise, the legal bases for Pavel Durov’s arrest are the offences set out in the LOI n° 2023-22 du 24 janvier 2023 d’orientation et de programmation du ministère de l’intérieur, which inserts Article 323- 3-2 and an additional paragraph (the twelfth) to Article 706-73-1 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and by the Loi n° 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004 pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique that subjects the use of cryptography for uses other than authentication and integrity checks to ministerial authorisation (in practice if it serves to prove one’s identity in an e-commerce service, encryption is freely usable, if it serves to encrypt information it must be authorised by the government) by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by Strategikon – Italian Tech La Repubblica Continue reading “Allegations against Pavel Durov call into question Big Tech’s stay in Europe”