[fsfe-it] Italian BBA 2009 winners

[Marco A. Calamari]

Here the english translation of Winners announcement
 and motivation for Italian BBA.
Please send it to all possible interested parties.

This years awards was very important, being italian
 privacy manaced by several new law proposals.

Here
http://bba.winstonsmith.info/bba2009_conferenza_stampa_MP515438.mp3
the audio of the announcement of winners
 done in the Italian parliement, Low Chamber
 of Representiatives

Thanks!  Marco

====================================================

Big Brother Awards Italy 2009
Winners announcement

Today, the votes of the jurors for the Big Brother Awards Italia
2009(http://bba.winstonsmith.info/) is public. The jurors have made
their choice on the basis of the proposals sent by all Italians.

This is the first year when the winners are announced first to the
press. The prizes will be handed out during the E-Privacy 2009 meeting,
which will be held in Florence on Saturday, May 23.

The Big Brother Awards come in six flavours:

- Worst public organisation

- Worst private company

- Most invasive technology

- “Boot mouth”

- “Lifelong threat”

- “People's Lament”


Besides the “negative” prizes, there is also a positive one - the


- Winston Smith – Privacy Hero


The Big Brother Awards are assigned on the basis of public proposals,
which are selected and voted by a jury.

For a month everyone, even anonymously, was able to propose persons or
organisations for one of the prizes. The nominations have been evaluated
by a jury, which has voted the most meaningful; each of the 6 members of
the jury gave 5 points to the most meaningful proposal, 3 for the second
and 1 for the third – this for each category.

The proposal with the maximum score (the best one can get is 30) gets
the prize. In case of an equal result the jury goes for a second round;
if there is still an equal result, the president of the jury decides.


The winner of one of the prizes has already been announced; it's the
“People's Lament” prize, assigned without a decision of the jury to the
person or organisation which received the largest number of negative
proposals.

This year we received 56 proposals, of which 48 were complete – 40 for
the negative prizes and 8 for the positive one.


This year, the prize “People's Lament” has been won to the well-known
social network operator Facebook, with 12 proposals on 40.


The organises of BBA Italia 2009 have already invited Facebook to send a
representative to Florence to take the prize.


The winners of the other categories are announced today. These prizes
will be handed out on May 23 and all winners are invited to send a
representative.



Prize "Most invasive technology": facebook(21/30).

Facebookis not a really innovative technology, since it uses almost
exclusively existing standard technologies. What is unique is the
specific mix that, like for Dr. Jekyll's drug, encourages to the maximum
possible extent the compulsive need to put our personal data on the
Internet.

It does this with the protection of a policy that, although it has been
largely discussed and even partially changed, allows any type of use of
any textual, graphical, relational data put into into.

The success of the company is an indication of its dangerous ability to
profile and control its users. The fact that it stores and processes not
only simple search or email messages, such as Google, but directly
social relationships, i.e. the most intimate of personal data, makes it
potentially much more dangerous. 


Prize "Worst private company": facebook(25/30)



Facebookmanages to establish an unprecedent record in the history of the
Big Brother Awards, in Italy and elsewhere, winning this prize with an
almost unanimous score.

Notwithstanding the trendy and informal “look and feel” of this company,
its behaviour is rather disappointing. The recent and known case of an
“acceptable use policy” that allows everything to Facebook and nothing
to its users (as is unfortunately “natural” for a free service which
must obtain its income through other means) goes on par with an
unsatisfactory care to those who see their accounts violated by
strangers or blocked by Facebook itself on the basis of third parties'
notifications.

Without discussing the functioning of this social community, Facebook
is, in the experience of those who voted it for this prize, a
substantially “opaque” company, very difficult to contact, which does
not make its business plans public and shares very little of its
internal operations or its current and future strategies.


Prize "Lifelong Threat": MP Gabriella Carlucci (16/30)

MP Carlucci has promoted in the past some law proposals that keep into
very low esteem those honest persons with a double citizenship, of Italy
and of the Internet. A network which is full of “pedo-terror-satanists”
or by stupids in need of protection. Such as her recent proposal DDL
2195/2009, originally titled “Internet, a territory of freedom, of
rights and of duties”, and now “scaled down” to “Measures to ensure the
legality of the Internet network and assigning power to the Government
to create to this end a committee of the Authority for Communications”.

This law proposal had been promoted as a remedy to limit the
“widespread” illegality on Internet and to fight against pedophily.

The document, which had no trace of such intentions, has been
immediately analysed by Netizens, who discovered that the document has
been written by Davide Rossi, the president of Univideo. The reactions
that followed have convinved many that “freedoms and rights” of the
proposal are only those of the holders of so-called “intellectual
property rights” and the “duties” are only those of Italian citizens, to
be turned into homogenous and disciplined “consumers of bit”. There
continues to be no trace of any “pedo*” stuff in the final text, which
spends most of its length to define and create a new


"...high authority with functional and investigation powers, with no
prejudice to the role of criminal, civil and administrative judges and
to the functions of existing regulatory and control bodies."


Netizens are, clearly, incredibly missing such a new authority.


The “very high authority” would have in its remit to regulate:


"... all the activities of access to the Internet done by or through
devices or infrastructures located in the national territory."


In short: an Italian Little Brotherto identify everyone, destroying the
Italian Internet as we know it, in order to save intellectual property
rights.

On the other hand, our Constitution refers not to the latter but rather
to freedom of expressionand inviolability of communication, but this
only shows that our Constitutions needs to be changed (again).



Prize "Foul Mouth": MP Gabriella Carlucci (21/30)

MP Carlucciestablishes a new record – two prizes in one year – which is
unfortunately immediately surpasses by Facebook, which gets three
prizes. For a single person this is anyway without precedent. This prize
is for the “most terrifying” public sentence on the topic of privacy and
civil rights on the Net.


"The time has come to fight and destroy anonimity on the Internet. Yet
another time, anonymous criminals use the Internet to slander, ridicule,
categorise, offend, denounce. This time the target is our police forces,
filed and offended by an anonymous blogger. This is the umpteenth
unacceptable case of an improper use of the Internet, showing how badly
and urgently we need a law preventing law-breakers to use the net for
anti-social goals, hiding behind the cover of anonimity.”


And this is it for honest Italian citizens, who since some centuries
have used their right to anonimity, even if only by sending a letter
with no sender, when they feel they need to, without creating police
crisis or institutional collapses, and without this preventing the fight
against crime.


Prize "Worst public organisation": Ministry of Home Affairs (23/30)

TheMinistry of Home Affairshas implemented an initiative to identify and
file all roma children, via compulsory fingerprinting.

With the approval of the so-called “Security Package”, the Ministry will
probably get the possibility to censor websites without a prior judicial
decision, using the technological infrastructure funded and built for a
fictitious action to contract “pedo-pornography”, and getting back to
using the never forgotten crime of “apology of ...”, the real swiss
knife of censorship.


Prize "Winston Smith – Privacy Hero": Electronic Frontier Foundation
(15/30)

The US organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation works to defend
privacy and civil rights on the Internet since 1990.

Its activities, always visionary and dedicated, have had important
effects throughout the world, including in Italy.

The support given to Tor (http://tor.eff.org) has been one of its most
important activities, but its ongoing attention and reaction to all
initiatives aimed at censoring the Net or repress freedom of expression
has been absolutely precious.

All Netizens, whether Italian or not, have a real debt towards it. For
this reason it receives a prize which is normally reserved to Italian
organisations – which this year have not been as effective.


What's the Big Brother Award ?

What is Big Brother Awards Italy? It is a "negative" prize which is
awarded in the whole world to those who have most endangered privacy.

In a scenario where privacy is virtually annihilated by new technologies
and controversial initiatives to enhance "security", where censorship is
becoming a normal tool for social control, the BBA aims to bring
attention to the worst privacy offenders, who often benefit from the
fact that - as usual - public spotlight is kept far away from these
subjects.


In the best tradition of the Internet, the BBA is a serious initiative
which doesn't take itself too seriously. The BBA is also about having
fun, not because the issues under consideration are not serious, but
because having fun is the best way to do things effectively. For this
reason, the award event, which will take place on May 23 during
E-Privacy 2009 (http://e-privacy.winstonsmith.info), will sport some
surpsirses..


BBA Italy is organised by the Winston Smith Project (link
http://www.winstonsmith.info/pws), in cooperation with Privacy
International (http://www.privacyinternational.org/) and other
organisations.


Per more information info at winstonsmith.info

-- 

+--------------- http://www.winstonsmith.info ---------------+
| il Progetto Winston Smith: scolleghiamo il Grande Fratello |
| the Winston Smith Project: unplug the Big Brother          |
| Marco A. Calamari marcoc at marcoc.it  http://www.marcoc.it   |
| DSS/DH:  8F3E 5BAE 906F B416 9242 1C10 8661 24A9 BFCE 822B |
+ PGP RSA: ED84 3839 6C4D 3FFE 389F 209E 3128 5698 ----------+

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 307 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://mail.fsfeurope.org/pipermail/fsfe-it/attachments/20090522/c446032d/attachment.pgp>