Italy: Surveillance: Ombudsman calls for protection of rights
01 November 1999
Stefano Rodota, the Italian ombudsman for the protection of personal data, an authority established in the 31 December 1996 Data Protection Act, has issued a number of statements attacking efforts to undermine individual rights in the name of collective security. He has expressed concern for approaches to the surveillance of telecommunications which ask the question: "If I have nothing to hide, why should I need the protection?", arguing that this reasoning is not far removed from ideas which would deny the right to protection. Rodota stresses the importance of not accepting everything that is technologically feasible as acceptable, and feels that the only defence available to the "individual" are rules.
Rodota has been particularly active in the fields of telecommunications, stressing the importance of ensuring that the internet remains a forum for the expression ideas, guaranteeing the anonymity of users. On 10 March 1999, he met some Intel representatives to demand that they provide him with information regarding the "processor serial number" on their processors and on 15 March 1999, he asked mobile telephone service providers, Tim, Omnitel and Wind, for "detailed information on the methods of data collection regarding the location from which calls are made, and whether they are also active when the mobile phone is on standby". In October 1998, he ruled that telephone companies should allow clients to use anonymous phonecards.
In an article for La Repubblica, Rodota pointed out that requests by investigating magistrates and police often appear reasonable, although their effective implementation would have serious implications for civil liberties. Analysing the possible consequences of a request for unlimited access, for investigative purposes, to telephone transcripts, by judicial authorities, Rodota said that it was necessary to consider the quantitative and qualitative improvements in the collection and storage of data. He notes that telephone transcripts are now stored for up to five years, creating an enormous database of approximately 70 billion telephone calls. This represents:
"A very tightly knit net which envelops the whole of society, which makes it possible to ruthlessly follow every trace any one of us leaves, reconstructing the totality of social relations by identifying all the people one has called, the location where the calls were made, and their length. There is an obvious risk of abuse: several national authorities have pointed it out and...a recent, concerned resolution by the Committee of European Data Protection Authorities suggested that the storing of data should even be limited to 3 months....It is no longer a choice between safety and privacy, but between freedom and privacy."
His concerns are borne out at a European level. At the meeting of the Joint Supervisory Authority (JSA) for the Schengen Agreement in Florence on 27 and 28 May, Rodota stressed how the SIS, Europol, Eurodac, CIS and draft fingerprint databanks will contain a lot of sensitive information (6.5 million entries for the SIS alone). "The proper use of this information and adequate controls to guarantee its transparency", he continued, "can only be guaranteed by an independent authority with effective powers, and the JSA suffers a kind of small bureaucratic boycott by the European Union".
L'Unita 3.5.99.; La Repubblica 20.1.99., 20.10.99.; www.senato.it "Parla il Garante: privacy ed Internet, al Parlamento chiedo che "; www.privacy.it: "Schengen. Per i garanti europei occorre alzare il livello delle garanzie nei confronti delle banche dati", "Caso Pentium III. Il garante incontra Intel"; Privacy and Human Rights - An International Survey of Privacy Laws and Developments, Epic, 1999;