Italian magistrate investigates police harassment Web site

Police raid the homes of four people suspected of contributing to the Hunt the Cop site

A prosecutor in the northern Italian city of Bologna is investigating a Web site allegedly set up by left-wing extremists in order to harass and threaten the police.The existence of the site, called Hunt the Cop, first emerged in March, following protests by a trade union organization representing police officers. The site published photographs of plainclothes and uniformed police officers and invited visitors to help identify them by name, rank, unit and operational area. "The strength of the political police is based on the fact that its agents, infiltrators, spies and collaborators are unknown to the popular masses. Making them known is a practical way of making their dirty work if not impossible, at least difficult," the site said.Before the judicial authorities were ready to take action the site was disabled by hackers identifying themselves as NETGODS H@cker Crew, who claimed to be "in favor of honest people and the police." Visitors to the site found themselves redirected to MyBookFace, an altogether less-alarming site identified as "a friendly social networking alternative to MySpace and FaceBook."On April 8 police raided the homes of four people suspected of contributing to the Hunt the Cop site and seized photographs and computer equipment from addresses in Milan and Naples. The suspects are believed to belong to two extreme leftist organizations, the Association of Proletarian Solidarity (ASP) and the Committee for the Support of the Communist Resistance (CARC), and to be in contact with another left-wing organization, based in Paris, known as the New Communist Party."We are investigating a number of people for violating the privacy law, instigating people to commit a crime and defamation," said Morena Plazzi, the Bologna public prosecutor who is coordinating the inquiry. Instigating people to commit a crime, the most serious offense, carries a maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment, Plazzi said in a telephone interview."We are in the initial phase of the investigation. The Bologna court met today to consider the legitimacy of our search of properties occupied by four suspects. They are expected to make a ruling in the next few days," Plazzi said.The prosecutor said the suspects had used servers in France and the United States to post their material to the Web and had used the TOR program from The Tor Project to anonimize their online activities.

"We are carrying out international rogatories (requests for international judicial assistance) to identify who was responsible for posting the material online," Plazzi said. "If they used encryption we may not be able to establish for certain who was responsible for posting the material."Plazzi, who specializes in antiterrorism investigations, said it was paradoxical that hackers should have proved more efficient in taking down the offending site than the judicial authorities. She said there was currently no investigation into the theoretically illegal activities of the pro-police hackers.Though the CARC and the New Communist Party have been campaigning for the rights of political prisoners, including those of Red Brigades terrorists, there was no evidence that they were involved in violence themselves, Plazzi said. "The CARC can't be defined as a terrorist group. They like to appear in the media, but it's more a matter of rhetoric than action," she said.Last year Plazzi was responsible for a similar investigation into a Web page posted on the Italian Indymedia site that identified police officers serving in the Bologna area. On that occasion she abandoned attempts to get the page removed, as it was impossible to achieve without taking down much of the Indymedia Italy Web site and the verbal attacks on the page were more moderate than those on Hunt the Cop. "We gave up the attempt because the consequences would have been out of proportion to the limited gravity of the case," she said. An anarchist Web site in the neighboring city of Ferrara also identifies potential targets for attack among police, as well as business and political leaders, and led to the opening of a separate investigation earlier this month. A less-hostile initiative, ratemycop.com,

was taken down by U.S. ISP GoDaddy in March after police expressed security concerns.Plazzi acknowledged that people with seriously violent intentions would probably not post their information about potential targets on an open blog but said the Hunt the Cop site had nevertheless provoked concern among those working to uphold the law. "It's a troubling initiative, with profoundly insulting verbal attacks. Fair and correct it is not," she said.On Monday the site had returned at a new address, inviting visitors to "denounce the slaves of the regime" and attacking "those responsible for massacring the popular masses in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Palestine, the torturers of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and those who beat up the workers."

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A prosecutor in the northern Italian city of Bologna is investigating a Web site allegedly set up by left-wing extremists in order to harass and threaten the police.The existence of the site, called Hunt the Cop, first emerged in March, following protests by a trade union organization representing police officers. The site published photographs of plainclothes and uniformed police officers and invited visitors to help identify them by name, rank, unit and operational area. "The strength of the political police is based on the fact that its agents, infiltrators, spies and collaborators are unknown to the popular masses. Making them known is a practical way of making their dirty work if not impossible, at least difficult," the site said.Before the judicial authorities were ready to take action the site was disabled by hackers identifying themselves as NETGODS H@cker Crew, who claimed to be "in favor of honest people and the police." Visitors to the site found themselves redirected to MyBookFace, an altogether less-alarming site identified as "a friendly social networking alternative to MySpace and FaceBook."On April 8 police raided the homes of four people suspected of contributing to the Hunt the Cop site and seized photographs and computer equipment from addresses in Milan and Naples. The suspects are believed to belong to two extreme leftist organizations, the Association of Proletarian Solidarity (ASP) and the Committee for the Support of the Communist Resistance (CARC), and to be in contact with another left-wing organization, based in Paris, known as the New Communist Party."We are investigating a number of people for violating the privacy law, instigating people to commit a crime and defamation," said Morena Plazzi, the Bologna public prosecutor who is coordinating the inquiry. Instigating people to commit a crime, the most serious offense, carries a maximum sentence of five years' imprisonment, Plazzi said in a telephone interview."We are in the initial phase of the investigation. The Bologna court met today to consider the legitimacy of our search of properties occupied by four suspects. They are expected to make a ruling in the next few days," Plazzi said.The prosecutor said the suspects had used servers in France and the United States to post their material to the Web and had used the TOR program from The Tor Project to anonimize their online activities.

"We are carrying out international rogatories (requests for international judicial assistance) to identify who was responsible for posting the material online," Plazzi said. "If they used encryption we may not be able to establish for certain who was responsible for posting the material."Plazzi, who specializes in antiterrorism investigations, said it was paradoxical that hackers should have proved more efficient in taking down the offending site than the judicial authorities. She said there was currently no investigation into the theoretically illegal activities of the pro-police hackers.Though the CARC and the New Communist Party have been campaigning for the rights of political prisoners, including those of Red Brigades terrorists, there was no evidence that they were involved in violence themselves, Plazzi said. "The CARC can't be defined as a terrorist group. They like to appear in the media, but it's more a matter of rhetoric than action," she said.Last year Plazzi was responsible for a similar investigation into a Web page posted on the Italian Indymedia site that identified police officers serving in the Bologna area. On that occasion she abandoned attempts to get the page removed, as it was impossible to achieve without taking down much of the Indymedia Italy Web site and the verbal attacks on the page were more moderate than those on Hunt the Cop. "We gave up the attempt because the consequences would have been out of proportion to the limited gravity of the case," she said. An anarchist Web site in the neighboring city of Ferrara also identifies potential targets for attack among police, as well as business and political leaders, and led to the opening of a separate investigation earlier this month. A less-hostile initiative, ratemycop.com,

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