[Dailydave] The Neutron Star

[Arrigo Triulzi]

On Jun 27, 2013, at 22:21, Dave Aitel <dave at immunityinc.com> wrote:
> To paraphrase the Economist article you link to, which I think says it all (below) "No." 

I left my home country at a young age but I still carry its passport, a country which in barely 50 years managed to produce a rather colourful set of crooks in government (demonstrably crooks see bit.ly/6n36JJ and bit.ly/1Yb8x or more generically bit.ly/12CebJb for the famous ones who made it to the English translation).

These were or are all elected officials, allegedly accountable and yet felt free to do as they wished with the citizen's property and life.

Amongst the great productions of this era is how the politicians happily allowed, no sorry, encouraged the national telco to set up a private "secret service" spying on who they wanted, when they wanted and, as if this wasn't enough, even offered it as a "service" to friends & family. This is apparently now known as the "SISMI-Telecom Italia scandal" (bit.ly/aYh2kO), at the time it was just the "Telecom" scandal involving their Tiger Team (Boatti & Tavaroli, bit.ly/edL4CL in Italian), without involving the now-renamed military secret service.

So, while I am not privy to anything at all about the current NSA issue, I am pretty sure that Italian exports in bad government and criminality in general have made it across the ocean.  Perhaps they are not yet as professional but just like in Switzerland they now open a road four times in a row within an year to install different things for the benefit of the construction companies (that's Mafia 101, even a child in Italy knows that trick but for the Swiss it is pretty novel) perhaps someone else has also learned how to do things on the dirty side in the telco world.

Now of course in other countries what our politicians call "helping a friend" is called "lobbying" but hey, I'm sure that is just a misunderstanding.

Cynically yours,

Arrigo