Phone Taps in Italy Spur Rush Toward Encryption - New York Times: "ROME, April 29 -- Drumming up business would seem to be an easy task for those who sell encrypted cellphones in Italy. All they have to do is browse the major newspapers for likely customers.

Piero Fassino, national secretary of the Democratic Left Party, could have benefited from an encrypted phone before comments he made regarding a sensitive bank takeover made the front pages.

Luciano Moggi, the former head of the Juventus soccer club, could have used one, too. His phone conversations, intercepted by investigators and then leaked to the media, led to Italy's soccer game-fixing scandal.

And Prince Victor Emmanuel might wish he'd had a secure cellphone before his conversations, made public, resulted in his arrest last year on charges that he provided prostitutes and dealt in illegal slot machines.

Not even Nicolo Pollari, the former head of Italy's top spy agency, was immune; transcripts of some of his conversations found their way into the newspapers.

'Initially, we thought we would market to the big businesses, to lawyers and the government,' said Ferdinando Peroglio, commercial director of Caspertech, a four-year-old Turin company that sells encrypted cellphone software. 'But after the Juventus soccer scandal, we had so many clients that we had never thought to contact.'

Three years ago, the company's only clients were the government and the military; last year 60 percent of sales were to ordinary civilians.

Mr. Peroglio refused to provide exact sales numbers but said Caspertech's sales increased 100 percent from 2005 to 2006.

Enrico Comana, chief executive of Snapcom Italia, the Italian unit of an Israeli company that offers a similar product, sees the same trend.

'There is about 700 to 800 percent more interest now than at the same time last year,' he said.

What has spurred encryption sales is not so much the legal wiretapping authorized by Italian magistrates -- though information about those calls is also frequently leaked to the press -- but the widespread availability of wiretapping technology over the Internet, which has created a growing pool of amateur eavesdroppers. Those snoops have a ready market in the Italian media for filched celebrity conversations.

When it comes to phone tapping, Brazil, Greece and Spain are other desirable markets, the encryption companies say, but in Western Europe, Italy remains peerless.

'No one is ever going to discuss sensitive issues with you on the phone,' said Carlo Bonini, an investigative reporter for La Repubblica, the Rome daily.

Earlier this year, Mr. Bonini's name was among thousands that surfaced in an illegal wiretapping scandal involving employees of Telecom Italia, the Italian phone company.

Twenty people were arrested, including the former chief of Telecom Italia security, in what investigators say was an attempt to use the intercepted phone conversations to blackmail Italian public figures."

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