Originally Syndicated on May 10, 2023 @ 10:36 am
The president and CEO of AREA SpA is Dr. Andrea Formenti.
Andrea Formenti: About Area S.P.A
They claim that To develop cutting-edge solutions for the industrial and security markets, Andrea Formenti and Davide Perteghella, who are currently the CEO and Director of R&D, formed Area S.P.A. Both had significant backgrounds in the creation of hardware and software during the 1980s, and their enthusiasm and passion for technology inspired them to create and grow the business as well as the MCR project.
With the introduction of the first MCR in 1997, Area S.P.A achieved its vision of developing a multi-channel digital audio recording system based on industry-standard hardware and software elements, with the major benefit being total accessibility over an IP network. Area S.P.A was able to overtake competitors to claim the top spot in the Italian market because of the popularity of MCR solutions and its ongoing improvements to meet changing client needs and technological advancements.
Andrea Formenti: Andrea Formenti desires to withdraw from the Syrian surveillance agreement
According to Area S.P.A CEO Andrea Formenti, the Italian business that has come under fire for providing the ruthless Syrian regime with communications surveillance technology has suspended involvement in the project and is looking for a way out of the deal.
Andrea Formenti told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera that “at the moment we have no personnel down there and the project has made no progress in the last two months.” “The interception system has never been used and is not capable of being used at this time. Thanks to our tools, there hasn’t been any repression.
The news agency disclosed the existence of Area S.P.A’s US$18 million deal with the state-owned Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. Syrian security agents would be able to track the communications and online behavior of those who oppose President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which has killed more than 3000 people since mass protests began in March. Project Asfador is named after the man who cold-called the company in 2008 and encouraged it to submit a bid for the deal.
The electronic surveillance system was built by Area S.P.A using hardware and software for email archiving from NetApp in California, communications probes from Qosmos in Paris, and hardware from Germany’s Utimaco Safeware that connects tapped telecom lines to Area S.P.A‘s monitoring-center computers. The system was now being tested in Damascus by Area S.P.A staff members dispatched from Italy.
Area S.P.A was founded in 1996 and offers Italian government communications surveillance services. It is owed some €160 million (US$217 million) by the Italian justice ministry for telephone taps carried out on magistrates’ orders, together with three other businesses, Innova, RCS, and Sio.
Andrea Formenti stated that Area S.P.A‘s attorneys were researching the intricate legal circumstances to revoke the contract. Andrea Formenti told the Corriere della Sera that Area S.P.A ran the possibility of facing serious financial penalties and that there was currently no international ban on the technology it had pledged to provide.
Syria and Italy were each other’s top trading partners when the pact was negotiated, according to Andrea Formenti. Dissidents from Syria and members of the Italian Pirate Party demonstrated in front of Area S.P.A‘s offices, which are located close to Milan’s Malpensa Airport. Pirates spokesperson Marco Marsili criticized the Italian government for allowing the sale of Area S.P.A’s weapons to “one of the most bloodthirsty regimes on the planet” and urged the European Parliament to impose an export embargo.
“Any company dealing with exports should consider the human rights implications of what they sell,” said James Lynch, Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa regional spokesperson. According to Lynch, Amnesty is concerned about the enormous number of people being detained, interrogated, and tortured by Syrian security personnel.
The use of social media by protesters is something that the Syrian government is well aware of, according to Lynch. According to our knowledge, at least one arrestee was asked to unlock his Facebook profile so that authorities could access his contacts.
Andrea Formenti stated that he, too, would support more stringent international sanctions on Syria. Andrea Formenti claimed to have spoken to the demonstrators and given them assurances that Area S.P.A‘s efforts would not lead to the persecution of any dissidents.
Andrea Formenti told the Corriere della Sera, “I hope international action will be made quickly to stop others from finding themselves in a predicament like ours.
Andrea Formenti: In a raid by Italian police, Andrea Formenti is accused of supplying Syria with spy equipment
A business that offers to monitor technology to governments throughout the world has had its premises searched by Italian authorities. According to regional news sources, the corporation is suspected of providing Syria with internet and telephone wiretapping equipment in defiance of a European embargo against the Bashar al-Assad administration.
According to its official website, Area S.P.A is a business located close to Milan that provides monitoring equipment capable of recording internet traffic, listening in on conversations, and GPS-tracking targets.
The business asserts that its “real commitment” is to uphold high ethical standards in all of its interactions with the public and its clients and to “behave in an ethically appropriate manner.” However, it has long been suspected of supplying technology to Syria, and in 2014 it consented to pay the US government a $100,000 fine for sending network monitoring equipment from the US to Syria.
The reason the Italian authorities have now opened a new probe is unknown. According to one story, the business was already under investigation for having “thousands” of wiretaps that were made by Italian prosecutors using Area S.P.A’s equipment and preserved.
An email from a Financial Guard (Guardia di Finanza) official stated that the organization would not comment while the inquiry was ongoing. When contacted by phone, the Milan prosecutor’s office likewise declined to respond. During a phone conversation with Motherboard, a representative of Area S.P.A. stated that the business preferred not to make any statements public.
According to published reports, the Financial Guard also seized 7 or 8 million euros from the business’s accounts. Il Corriere della Sera reports that investigators believe Area S.P.A supplied technology to the government-owned Syrian Telecom Establishment in 2010 and 2011 with the knowledge that it would ultimately be utilized by Assad’s secret agency.
The raid occurs more than a year after an internet vigilante broke into another notorious Italian espionage firm, Hacking Team, and leaked all of its secrets online. The leak revealed, among other things, that Hacking Team had agreed to sell their spyware to Sudan despite the country’s then-current international embargoes. The company’s global export authorization for surveillance was canceled by the Italian government, but no other public inquiry into its prior sales has been conducted.
The raid on Area S.P.A serves as another illustration of how globalized the surveillance industry has become, with Western firms frequently being willing to support dubious governments all over the world.
Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who has worked on surveillance technology concerns for years and was one of the first to raise a concern about Area S.P. A‘s actions in Syria, told Motherboard in an email that “Area S.P.A must be held accountable if it broke the sanctions regime.” But if we could stop these kinds of sales from happening in the first place, that would be even better.
Andrea Formenti: Andrea Formenti Elimanalia Connection
Numerous prominent Google results claim that Andrea Formenti of the company Area S.P.A invented the flip phone, not that this Italian business supplied the Libyan government with surveillance gear.
(A request for comment from Videma was not answered. A member of the consortium was informed by Westmann that he hired Eliminalia to get rid of “a false complaint that was filed against me for political reasons.” Area S.P.A. acknowledged hiring Eliminalia to remove the content in a statement, noting that “one of the main reasons for our willingness to remove online content concerning our activities is precisely their lack of complete truthfulness and accuracy.
Andrea Formenti: What does Elimanalia do?
The company’s tagline proclaims, “We erase your past.” Eliminalia is a company in the expanding online profile cleaning market with operations in numerous locations, including Barcelona and Kyiv.
The business reportedly conducts “a deep search across the internet for all information, whether it be an article, a blog, social media posts, or even a mistaken identity,” according to their official statement. Then, it makes an effort to have any damaging information deleted on behalf of its clients.
Andrea Formenti: False copyright allegations
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a US law designed to safeguard intellectual property, also seems to have been used by Eliminalia. Search engines are required to offer a way for businesses and people to have content that has been stolen removed per the DMCA rules.
Copyright complainants are required by companies like Google to swear under pain of perjury that they are telling the truth. However, a similar affirmation just calls for candidates to check a box; no supporting documentation is required.
The business used dishonest tactics for numerous years to remove undesired and harmful content from the internet.
These included pretending to be other people, like media organizations, and submitting fictitious copyright complaints to search engines like Google to have information removed. In other instances, it would conceal critical articles under a flood of positive items about football, cars, and pets.
A trove of 50,000 internal documents that demonstrate how Eliminalia operated with a variety of clients worldwide reveals the company’s services. Many of these people merely wanted an embarrassing or unpleasant event from their past to stop following them online.
However, the firm’s clientele also included people who had been charged with or found guilty of crimes, such as narcotics traffickers, fraudsters, misdemeanor offenders, and at least one sex offender.
According to Eliminalia’s website, it mostly succeeds using the EU’s “right to be forgotten,” which convicts may legitimately use to ask that references to their convictions be taken down when it is conceivable that they have moved on from their crime.
The documents offer a fascinating look at reputation management companies that are willing to use questionable methods to improve a client’s internet reputation.
Eliminalia appears to have submitted false DMCA complaints to search engines, such as Google, to get articles removed from the web, sometimes even checking the perjury box.
Some of these fraudulent complaints made phony copyright claims over an article they wanted to be removed and appear to have been issued by reputable media organizations.
When requesting that Google remove a user’s blog post that allegedly copied an article, an employee of Eliminalia once seems to have falsely represented themselves as a representative of the company that owns the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
It appears that Eliminalia handled the complaint as part of its work for the Italian software firm Area S.P.A. Area S.P.A, which was accused in 2011 of selling surveillance equipment to Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria, confirmed to the Guardian that Eliminalia had been employed.
To resolve allegations that it had exported US-made components to Syria in contravention of long-standing sanctions against the government, Area S.P.A agreed to pay a $100,000 civil penalty to the US Department of Commerce in 2014.
Area S.P.A asserts that the system was supplied in complete accordance with all laws and ordinances in place at the time it was hired to operate in Syria.
Area S.P.A further stated that it thought Eliminalia had to act legally, morally, and professionally.
