Berlusconi's tip tap

There is an interesting debate right now in Italy. No, it's not about Berlusconi dancing, but about tapping. 

In my country, this procedure has become ordinary in typical investigations. I guess it comes down to our natural genetical...laziness. Why should we waste a lot of time in useless research and analysis, busting our asses when we can stay with our earphones, seat somewhere and wait for things to happen ? In Italy, the amount of calls taped are of the order of 125000. That's huge!

The problem is not in the figures, as much as,  how it happens everywhere, info leak out and thus people, who might not even be investigated, end up on the cover page of newspapers and magazines, generally for facts which are not relevant to the charges. Why ?? Because people crave for somebody else misbehavior and like to point and judge everything with the hypocrisy of the just or maybe, simply because of our hunger for gossip. Whatever the reason, many people's lives have been smashed by this  and I believe it is correct to stop and think about it. I remember, in the US, the scandal opened by consequences of the Patriot Act when it was discovered that it was misused. Number of taps is very different, at least on paper, from what we are talking about here, despite there is a order of magnitude difference between the two populations. This is just to give a sense of how big the phenomenon is in Italy.

Now, what is the solution proposed by Berlusconi ? At least, as far as the public statements go (there is no text being presented at the moment),  in order to tap anybody, the charges the person is supposed to have committed should lead to 10 years in prison. This is an idiotic way to "solve" the problem. First of all, charges like Corruption (I remind the readers that this is one the charges for which Berlusconi has been mostly suited for) for instance are not included in this and corruption is something which big Crime organizations use as a normal tool to do what they like. Corruption, again, was the main charge for the big turmoil caused by what is known in Italy as "Tangentopoli", that is the Nation largest scandal in Public Administration. Secondly, tapping is useful because many much bigger crimes were discovered through tapping for completely different reasons. Thus, it just makes no sense whatsoever to take away from the investigators' hands one of their main tools. If this is the new sense of safety  Berlusconi wants to give, he has had a good start. To put things in order again, it would be simply necessary to prohibit publication until the actual trial starts and in any case of irrelevant info which might involve the private life of third parties, who have no part in the charges.