The Italian Crackdown
by Gomma, Decoder
gomma@decoderbbs.csmtbo.mi.cnr.it

This is the first time since the 60's that a young counterculture has 
moved this close to the requests of society in general, from the world of 
work and from the production of the meaning. In the 70's and 80's the 
counterculture was separated from the civil society by its own needs, but 
this has brought ghetto-ization. In the 90's it is mutated radically. And 
it assists a great creative phase united with the desire for a 
transformation of the existing circumstances. Modern times and the 
dynamics of production have created a new frontier, a new place where we 
could give life to a part of our dreams: the electronic frontier.

But in this new territory the law, when it exists, isn't very clear and 
often only the strongest survives. Like then, deviance and crime seem to 
be necessary in a paradoxical situation where the largest potential amount 
of access to the means of information in reality corresponds to a great 
lack in the sharing of communication. The breaking of the hypothetical 
rules of cyberspace was used like a symbolic element to demonstrate that 
we will not have to support the rules imposed by the media for all of our 
lives.

We believe, actually the most interesting side of this problem is what 
these creative crimes, or the creative usage of the new media put into the 
sphere of civil rights.

In these sense I'd like to recount some events that happened in Italy 
after the approval of the European Community's law on the duplication of 
software and computer crimes in general, facts that demonstrate that this 
law doesn't protect the interests of the citizens, but only those of the 
corporations. Keep in mind that this juridical monster stated that if you 
have in your PC a copied software you are under the criminal law.

The Italian corner of the electronic frontier has its own characteristic 
features.

Internet access is rare, so Italians tend to rely on smaller networks, 
such as Fidonet and a number of exclusively Italian networks for the 
sharing of information. The Italian territory also has a rhythm of its 
own. The main Italian networks, CyberNet, PeaceLink, P-net, do not bristle 
with the same high octane flame wars one finds on American bulletin 
boards, nor do they boast the same frenetic swapping of technical 
information and programs. Much more prominent are exchanges of information 
on topics like antifascism, and anti-mafia, the latest assaults by 
neo-fascists on African workers, the latest on AIDS research, and the 
shifting political currents in the ex-Yugoslavia. Even the non-militant 
boards gravitate to discussions of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zones, 
the latest from the keyboards of Bruce Sterling and Howard Rheingold, 
raves, computer art and problems related to the freedom of communications. 
It is, as a rule, a much more mellow territory.

That mellow atmosphere was punctuated violently on May 11th, 1994, when 
the Guardia di Finanza (Italy's "financial police") was unleashed in a 
massive operation codenamed "hardware1" immediately renamed the "Italian 
Crackdown" by the network community. Acting after a warrant issued by a 
Prosecutor in Pesaro, more than 100 Bulletin Board Systems throughout the 
country were visited and searched by police officials. Dozens of people 
were formally accused of "distribution of illegally copied software and 
appropriation of secret passwords". The charges are very grave: 
conspiracy, receiving of stolen goods, violation of data banks, 
duplication, and the possession of systems made for duplication (that is 
any computer that has a disk drive). So, crimes that, in the worst 
instance can put you in jail for 12 years only for having at home copied 
programs, paradoxically even if they're only for personal use. At the 
moment there are 122 arrest warrants for these crimes. The raids hit also 
private houses and belongings, and in some places sleeping people were 
abruptly woken up facing machine guns. The searches have been intense. The 
police searched everywhere, controlling under the beds, behind the 
wardrobes, looking through books page by page, trying to find the hidden 
disks. One bedroom was closed for two days because it held too much 
suspected material. In several cases police officials didn't know what to 
search for, so they seized computers, floppy disks, modems along with 
electrical outlets, answering machines, audiotapes, personal effects.

This is the official list of the confiscated stuff:

    * 159 computers
    * 110,000 diskettes "containing programs of dubious origin"
    * 60 CD-Rom readers
    * 400 CD-Roms
    * 800 tapes 

Moving after a suspected software piracy ring run by people involved in a 
Fidonet node, the crackdown started in the night between May 10 and 11 in 
Milano, targeting in the two following days BBSs in Pesaro, Modena, 
Bologna, Ancona, Pisa and other cities.

Fidonet Italia, member of the worldwide Fidonet network, is a non-profit 
organization devoted to distribution of shareware and freeware software as 
well as to electronic forums on topics ranging from technological to 
social issues.

At the moment, the raids seems to be motivated by accusations against two 
people involved in a Pesaro-based BBS who were using Fidonet contacts to 
allegedly distribute illegal copies of computer programs.

The prosecutor acted simply on the basis of the Fidonet telephone numbers 
list (publicly available) owned by the suspected. Pratically the 
investigators followed the street of the electronic mail inside Fidonet, 
to extend the operation to the other networks existing in Italy. The vast 
majority of the people searched don't have any kind of relationship with 
the two people first under investigation.

Particularly, the seizures of floppy disks and personal computers are 
completely unmotivated, because every BBS is a completely independent 
structure and each sysop is running his/her own hardware and software.

Because police officials seized also electronic and paper archives 
containing data, numbers and personal electronic mail of the people who 
logged onto Fidonet nodes, it is evident that investigations are going 
even further - thus violating the constitutional right to privacy. In fact 
in this law there are no rules to protect personal privacy in the 
electronic medium.

During the operation w-the sysop was considered the only responsible 
person about anything happened onto and around his/her own BBS, when the 
structure of a BBS makes impossible any objective responsibility for all 
the data or information that passes through it.

The first results of this crackdown are that many Fidonet operators 
decided to shut down immediately their systems all over the country, 
fearing heavier police intrusions in both their public activities and 
private lives. Furthermore its considered that every BBS has round 300 
users, therefore means that the operation has taken 30.000 people that 
used telematic services, taking their right to have access to information.

But the Italian operation wasn't finished!

As remaining networks scrambled to get the word out, one of the leading 
players was the PeaceLink network with its central node in Taranto. 
PeaceLink was a non-profit network of bulletin boards established almost 
exclusively for the exchange of information about anti-mafia and 
antifascist work, and had been one of few reliable lines of communication 
with the peoples of ex-Yugoslavia.

With its long tradition of left-leaning activism, it quite naturally took 
up the charge exchanging information and helping in the organization of 
meetings on the crackdown which were to be held in Rome and Pesaro at the 
end of June. On May 23 a Peacelink user distributed an electronic update 
on the crackdown, announcing, among other things, that "PeaceLink has set 
up a defense committee news center in Taranto."

On June 3, three weeks after the initial wave of crackdowns, the financial 
police raided the Taranto node of PeaceLink, confiscated its equipment and 
files - effectively silencing the network.

Clearly, Italy had had a huge problem with piracy. Piracy of records, 
videotapes, and even books has been widespread. Although perhaps not the 
largest piracy problem in Italy, software piracy was nevertheless 
significant. But a caveat is necessary here. Italy earned its reputation 
not from pirated software that was distributed through bulletin boards, 
but rather by software piracy that was encouraged by Italy's largest 
corporations. For example, in 1989 one raid at the headquarters of the 
Montedison industrial group discovered that 90% of the Lotus and 
Ashton-Tate software found on workstations were allegedly unauthorized 
copies. In the words of a senior analyst in a well-known consulting firm, 
"In-house software piracy isn't always just a widespread random activity 
in some Italian firms. It's often a systematic institutionalized 
procedure. In some cases software manuals were copied, neatly bound, and 
turned out with the company logo on the cover".

Some observers have held that in an environment with such widespread 
piracy, it is natural to suppose that pirate boards would be widespread. 
However one can also make the case that just the opposite is true. The 
widespread institutionalized piracy in Italy may have made underground 
pirate bulletin boards unnecessary.

Of course if piracy is defined broadly enough -- for example as being in 
possession at least one piece of unregistered software, most of the 
affected boards would probably fall under the definition. (For that 
matter, most people here at this moment would count as pirates.) Some of 
the boards were running unregistered BBS software. No doubt others had 
illegally copied programs here and there which had been uploaded. But of 
course when we think of pirate boards we think of boards established with 
the exchange of warez as its primary purpose, and here it seems that the 
"haul" from the crackdown was embarrassingly small, and this is difficult 
to understand. It would have been a simple matter to log onto these 
systems and check for piracy first, or at least find an informant who had 
spotted pirated materials. Even in the notoriously clumsy Operation 
Sundevil, all the boards had been examined beforehand (if only by 
informants). Yet there is no evidence that even these basic steps were 
taken in Italy.

Rather there appears to have been a widespread seizing of BBSs without any 
evidence that they carried pirated software.

Perhaps the Italian government was working on behalf of corporate 
interests to push out the smaller BBS's with the goal of making room for 
the larger corporations to establish interests on the electronic frontier. 
Who would these interests be? One candidate would surely be Silvio 
Berlusconi himself, the Italian Prime Minister and the leading media mogul 
of Italy. According to trade magazines like "Advertising Age", 
Berlusconi's Fininvest corporation controls 40% of the Italian television 
audience, 33% of all periodical circulation, 18% of the book publishing 
market, and 16% of the newspaper circulation. More importantly, 
Berlusconi's corporation controls 60% of the TV advertising revenue, and 
40% of all advertising revenues total in Italy!

Besides Berlusconi is now trying to enter the electronic frontier using 
the new compression algorithms for video-images that can be carried by 
telephone lines. Surely he must have seen a threat on the horizon to his 
near media monopoly.

But Berlusconi is not the only responsible in this scenario, of course. 
There are numerous corporate interests which may be primed to move into 
the electronic frontier, and cozy relationships between large corporations 
and the Italian government remain widespread.

The situation allowed the lobbyists created by the corporations themselves 
to act freely and undisturbed. In the programming field, the main lobby is 
SPA, and BSA is its flying squad. Its aim is not only to prepare and 
condition the public opinion, and to influence heavily the legislative and 
judicial powers and the governments, using "unfair" forms to act legally 
against their enemies. The most resounding case, recorded in Italy, has 
been a campaign with an invitation to become an "almost-anonymous 
informer" on software copiers printed on the largest Italian newspapers. 
They published a form of coupon to be signed with people's or company's 
names that have copied or used copied software. Using this kind of 
pressure, SPA and BSA obtained in America the model of the legislation on 
"software protection" later adopted like a monkey by the whole European 
Community.

Furthermore the BSA directed a press campaign six months before the police 
operation on the dangers constituted by the hackers and the role of the 
BBS in spreading the copied software. This campaign was supported by all 
the main italian informatic magazines.

It is now evident that there are other dynamics pushing an operation like 
this: the first is to rule the electronic frontier in an authoritarian 
manner. But let's take a look at the nature of cyberspace, the place in 
which the progressive pervasiveness of technology and its connections have 
created and will create more and more behaviours on the limits of the law. 
These behaviours don't involve necessarily a criminal will by the people 
who commit them, but they are determined by the nature itself of the 
medium and the daily ways of accessing it.

The new situation created by information technology consists of the fact 
that the information is totally digitizable and easily conserved and 
transmitted. Besides, its use is plastic and multimedial. The approach 
given by the new international laws was, on the contrary, based on rules 
of a Gutenbergian concept. We observed that they enormously limit the 
possibility of the use of the information even if this possibility is 
intrinsic to the digital media.

This scene is furthermore complicated by the fact that the behaviour the 
law intends to attack is widespread on a mass level.

So a repressive law can only create negative results considering their 
high social costs. Our proposal is to re-consider the problem of the 
"informatic emergency", opposing to it a philosophy of "electronic 
democracy". If it is necessary to have a law, this has to guarantee the 
rights of the citizens and not punish them heavily in the courts. This 
coup help to move the problem from the law-courts to more appropriate 
seats, public spaces in which could be possible to collect the opinions 
and the ideas of the inhabitants of the electronic frontier.

But coming back to the problem of copying and in general of the 
intellectual property, we think have to fight to affirm the right to copy 
for individual usage, to stress the social use, and the exchange of 
information without any kind of frontier or limit. We demand the 
decriminalization of copying and to rouse an exchange in the process of 
the construction of the information between free an equal subjects. In the 
same time, we want to facilitate and protect shareware programmers that 
had their products stolen and patented by big companies.

The right to copy allows us to realize strategies of psychic survival 
against the society of the spectacle and concretely affirms that the right 
to information is an ontological right of the social human being in this 
era. 
