The most disturbing thing about the draft law on wiretapping approved by the Senate’s Justice Committee is that the further the legislative process goes ahead, the worse the law is made. Each member of the Majority wants to add something of his own to it, to leave his indelible mark as a censor so as to please the boss.

At the centre of the censorship, there will be, above all, those – like many of you – that provide information on the Internet. Because with these new regulations all the sites (even the ones done by amateurs that are not registered as journalistic sources) will be considered to be like newspapers, thus subject to the obligation of rectification under the rules of the “Laws of the press”.

Any person who is cited on a website or a blog will be able to request rectification: in this case, the blogger “has to publish it within forty eight hours of the request, with the same graphic characteristics, the same access methodology and the same visibility as the news item to which it refers”. For anyone who doesn’t respect the time frame and the modality set down, the penalty is not to be laughed at: you risk a fine of up to 12,500 euro.

This means that behind an amateur blog or website there always has to be someone available for publishing rectifications. The blogger can no longer go off on holiday, be absent for a week-end, decide to take a pause from working on the Internet.

Otherwise it is imagined that behind every portal – even amateur ones – there’s always a redaction team. It’s the tomb of the freedom of information on the Internet. Above all now that it has been seen that thanks to the Internet it is possible to create important mobilization, without the need for great economic resources, or the support of the big newspapers.

This censorship fury against the free flow of ideas is not surprising: it is typical of the regimes in their death throes. This is what history teaches us, from Mussolini to Ceausescu. At the moment of exhaling their final breath, the dictators have tightened ever more their censorship networks. But the more they did that the more the voices of the Opposition got louder. This is why the moment has come to shout out our refusal. The louder that is, the sooner will come the end of the Berlusconian regime.