Italy Proposes Astonishingly Sensible Rules To Regulate Government Hacking Using Trojans

By Glyn Moody  Feb 17th 2017
 
As Techdirt has just reported, even though encryption is becoming more widespread, it's not still not much of a problem for law enforcement agencies, despite some claims to the contrary. However, governments around the world are certainly not sitting back waiting for it to become an issue before acting. Many have already put in place legal frameworks that allow them to obtain information even when encryption is used, predominantly by hacking into a suspect's computer or mobile phone. In the US, this has been achieved with controversial changes to Rule 41; in the UK, the Snooper's Charter gives the government there almost unlimited powers to conduct what it coyly calls "equipment interference."
 
One of the main tools for carrying out surveillance in this way is the trojan -- code that is placed surreptitiously on a suspect's system to allow it to be monitored and controlled by the authorities in real time over the Internet. There are clearly huge risks and problems with this approach, something that a legislative proposal from the Civic and Innovators parliamentary group in Italy tries to address, as explained by Fabio Pietrosanti and Stefano Aterno on Boing Boing. The draft law is the result of nearly two years' work by a group of experts from many fields:
 
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