Bugging prevalent in Italy

Watch what you say in Italy. You never know who might be listening.

The Eurispes think tank reveals in a new report that 30 million Italians between the ages of 15 and 70 have been bugged in the past 10 years.

"Every Italian family" has been touched by the phenomenon, it says, "at least once". And the amount of bugging is increasing at blinding speed.

In the past five years the Government has paid 1.25 billion ($2.2 billion) to phone companies to tap customers' phones. In the same period the number of taps increased by 125 per cent over the preceding five years.

The intrusion does not stop at tape-recording the conversations. When investigators pursuing the high and mighty catch a top banker or politician or gangster in flagrante delicto on the phone, they waste no time in releasing the transcripts to the press. If they are juicy enough they make front page news.

At 12 minutes past midnight on July 12, the Governor of the Bank of Italy, Antonio Fazio, phoned Gianpiero Fiorani, chief executive of Italian bank the Banca Popolare Italiana (BPI). For months the major Dutch bank ABN Amro had been seeking to win control of Banca Antonveneta, Italy's ninth biggest bank.

Fazio, appointed for life in 1993, is supposed to be impartial in such affairs. Instead it was strongly suspected that he helped to engineer a reverse takeover by BPI, to keep Banca Antonveneta in Italian hands. The tap, made public this month, seemed conclusive.

"Did I wake you up?" Fazio asks Fiorani.

"No, no."

"Right: I've just signed it, okay?"

"Ah, Tonino," says Fiorani, "I'm overcome with emotion, I've got goosebumps ... I'd like to kiss your forehead ... "

So far Fazio has admitted no wrongdoing.

It's an assault on privacy that one would expect the freedom-loving, tax-evading Italians to resent.

But when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi recently called for new controls to be slapped on the use of wiretapping, with jail terms of up to 10 years for those who leak or publish transcripts, there was scant enthusiasm. For once his populist instinct misfired.

It's not merely the prurient delights of listening at important people's keyholes that checks opposition to wiretapping. It is the widespread belief that bugging people's phones is often the only way for investigators, and the public, to find out some of what is really going on.

- INDEPENDENT