The Telegraph reports that at any one time in Italy 130,000 phone lines are being recorded by authorities, with a total of 3,000,000 Italians spied on every year.

Berlusconi has said a new law will ban the use of wire-taps except in investigations into terrorism and organised crime with illegal wiretaps carrying a penalty of up to five years in prison.

Italy has a population of 60 million, so this is the equivalent in New Zealand of a bit over 8,000 phone lines being tapped at any poin in time and 200,000 NZers being spied on by the state every year.

And people complain about the US Patriot Act!

I have some nervousness over this.  It is one thing to have a law which requires telcos to record the content of text messages *after they receive a search warrant targetted at a particular individual. But this is about having the telcos store every single text message we send or receive, so it can then be accessed.

The precedent this would set is that ISPs should also keep a copy of every e-mail message you ever send or receive, in case the Police should ever want it.  And then how about also requiring them to keep track of every website you have ever visited.

Telcos and ISPs should co-operate with the Police *after* a warrant has been served requiring interception or recording of data which a Judge/JP has authorised as necessary for a criminal investigation. But that is very different to having them forced to store personal communications on every NZer, so that law enforcement authorities can access them at some later date if they wish. Why not also have the teclso record every voice call, just in case they are also needed?