Although we never asked for it, and thanks to the Avezzano police and to Mr. Iannone, the leader of Casa Pound, we have become Norwegian super-stars. We would never have managed to obtain such a result on our own: you’ve been really great. The international rogatory letter that gave rise to the Norvegian Crackdown, i.e. the seizure/copy of a box A/I kept in Norway, has put us under the spotlights, triggering a wave of discussions in those remote lands of Viking origin.
(Short version)
In Italy, such a situation would have hardly received any public attention, as there is a number of aspects that work to our disadvantage:
- this story does not imply any boobies or young girls, there are no sexy details, so the audience is low.
- talking about the legitimacy of seizures and privacy and criticizing what the police do is complicated. It is very hard to be believed and listened to when people die in a jail or in the streets, the more so if the whole issue is about a copied hard disk. We are now used to receive answers like: “Good for you, at least you haven’t been curbstomped”.
But in Norway they are more sexually emancipated than here in Italy, and in the debate on data retention that is raging there, our case has been chosen as the emblem of a negative scenery, where the freedom of speech and thought is arbitrarily restricted due to a badly organized system.