FLASH
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The debate over wiretapping in Italy is reopened!
An idea that periodically resurfaces in the corridors of power in Rome is once again circulating: restructuring the architecture of the Italian secret services. The official goal is ambitious and at first glance rational: to simplify and make the national intelligence system more efficient.
But behind this technical discourse lies a profound transformation, affecting not only the internal organization of the two agencies, AISI (internal security) and AISE (external operations), but also one of the most delicate instruments of the state: preventive interceptions, which are not part of the criminal investigation, but are used to track and monitor potentially dangerous individuals.
This project is not simply administrative, it is deeply political and institutional. The government led by Giorgia Meloni walks a fine line between real security needs, international pressure for efficiency, and the demand for strengthening internal consensus.
Preventive wiretapping does not require criminal proof. It serves to prevent a potential danger and is authorized through a slow procedure: first with the signature of the Prime Minister, and then with the approval of the Prosecutor General at the Court of Appeals of Rome.
Now, there is discussion about speeding up this procedure, even about the possibility of immediate interception and delayed legalization. The reason? Modern dangers are immediate, dynamic, fluid. But the question arises: can judicial oversight be sacrificed for the sake of speed?
Reducing legal control means strengthening the role of the executive. And in the absence of balances, the risk increases that extraordinary measures will become the norm, violating the private lives of citizens even without concrete evidence of criminal acts.
Beyond the technical aspect, this innovation also affects the merging of roles between intelligence services and judicial police. If the services begin to eavesdrop without control and over wide areas, the boundary between strategic surveillance and criminal prosecution blurs, causing conflicts of competence, structural clashes, and legal uncertainties.
Another idea that often comes up is merging the two services into a single super-agency. On paper, this sounds effective: less bureaucracy, more strategic coherence. But in practice, it risks losing specialization, operational diversity, and institutional balances.
The internal service operates in a system burdened with constitutional guarantees. While the external one operates in an informal international environment, often in the shadows. Their unification under a single command could produce internal tensions and loss of real efficiency.
Today, parliamentary control over the services is limited and often symbolic. A larger, more secretive joint agency would make it even more difficult to monitor invisible balance sheets and classified operations. Not because of mistrust, but because of a lack of information.
Both the surveillance reform and the merger of secret services are symptoms of a dangerous trend: the temptation to take shortcuts in the name of efficiency. But history, in Italy and beyond, has shown that intelligence services, without control and without transparency, do not bring security, but insecurity. /Adapted from “Inside Over”
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