There is always a lot of attention to interceptions. Bloody controversies. But who thinks about chats? And who about the apps that make a mobile phone the treasure chest of all sensitive information, from geolocation to the exchange of photos, to purchases, to the network of friends? And here comes the government's crackdown on the work of prosecutors. With a little law that will be discussed in the Senate in April, it will be necessary for a investigating judge to rule for the seizure of a cell phone and above all to clarify what should be duplicated for investigation purposes and what not.
“Our reform has only implemented the minimum wage on wiretaps – says Minister Carlo Nordio on Radio 24 – and will be followed by others that are much more important. I am referring to the regulation of the seizure of mobile phones and smartphones.”
What until now was very simple for a prosecutor, who could seize a suspect's cell phone and put it under a microscope, will no longer be possible in the future. The Constitutional Court had also recently expressed itself in this sense, with a ruling on the Renzi case, which clarified how chats are to be equated with correspondence, and therefore protected by the Constitution; if a prosecutor needs it for an investigation, it must go through the evaluation of a judge. The judge for the preliminary investigations will therefore decide to seize the mobile phone, as well as for the acquisition of the contents, from which messages and all communications or documents deemed by the investigating judge to be not criminally relevant will be excluded.
It was the minister who wanted the innovation very strongly, even though the person who signed the amendment was Senator Sergio Rastrelli, FdI rapporteur for a Zanettin-Bongiorno bill which concerns the seizures of computer devices and systems, smartphones and digital memories. “Today – the minister explains with considerable controversy – there are not only conversations on the cell phone, there is an entire life. Therefore it cannot be placed in the hands of a public prosecutor who takes possession of it with a signature and perhaps later does not monitor its disclosure sufficiently”.
In short, we talk about cell phones and chats, but it is the figure of the prosecutor himself who ends up under accusation. The minister not even veiledly accuses them of appropriating the secrets protected by the Constitution too easily and then not caring if they are disclosed. It is therefore obvious that the National Association of Magistrates is offended. “It is striking – replies Alessandra Maddalena, vice-president of the ANM – that the public prosecutor is indiscriminately portrayed as a dark figure, out of control, who takes possession of the data and does not monitor their disclosure. It is a continuous work of delegitimizing the figure of the prosecutor, who at all costs wants to be represented as alien to the culture of the jurisdiction”. Not to mention that there will be a new mass of work on the investigating magistrates, who are already understaffed. The risk is the slowdown in investigations. And it remains to be seen how the rule will impact the system of incompatibilities, because it is a general principle that if a investigating judge deals with a suspect in an initial phase he will not be able to express himself again in the subsequent phases.
On the merits, although they agree on the highest principles, the opposition raises doubts. Therefore the Democratic Party has requested some hearings because “it raises alarm regarding the impact of the law on particularly delicate investigations, starting with those relating to the mafia”. Former minister Andrea Orlando says: “The problem exists; our entire life is on our cell phones. So it is right to provide an ad hoc discipline, but we obviously need to see how we intend to solve the problem. It depends on the tools you want to put in place.” And the M5S is immediately on the barricades: “Out of the blue they completely rewrote the bill, without however resolving the main problem of anticipating discovery which inevitably compromises the secrecy of the investigations”, explains Ada Lopreiato, group leader in the Justice commission. Also according Verdi-Left, “there is a risk of bureaucratization and excessive delays.”
These are completely unfounded concerns, however, according to Senator Pierantonio Zanetti of Forza Italia: “The criticisms appear frankly incomprehensible – he says. One wonders why the ANM is afraid of the role of the investigating judge in preliminary investigations.”
The problem is that it is difficult to find a balance between privacy and secrecy of investigations when a suspect has the right to appoint a trusted consultant who follows the forensic duplication operations of the information contained in his mobile phone. At the Ministry of Justice, where the law was developed, they explain that the solution to protect the investigations is immediate cross-examination, but not on the contents (because otherwise it would reveal the intentions of the prosecutor's office) and therefore the presence of the defender or one of his experts will be useful exclusively to guarantee correctness in the extraction and copying of data. “For a series of serious crimes, there won't even be an immediate cross-examination, but rather at a later time. This is to avoid damaging the tools to combat organized crime.”
#Justice #Nordio #seizure #cell #phones #entire #life #put #hands #prosecutor #ANM #magistrates #delegitimized