Trouble brews along with coffee in cyber-cafes

ROME

In a heavily immigrant neighborhood near the main railway station, Ahmed Sohel points dejectedly to the empty computer terminals at the modest storefront where he sells Internet and telephone service.

“Before, I was full of Internet clients, now I have no one left,” said Sohel, a middle-aged immigrant from Bangladesh.

A new Italian law requires businesses that offer Internet access to the public, like Sohel’s, to ask clients for identification and log the client’s name and the document type.

Cyber-cafes also must make and keep a photocopy of the ID and be registered with their local police station, according to the law, part of an anti-terror package approved after the July terrorist bombings in London.

Many cyber-cafe owners say the law has boosted their work load and cut their profit.

“We’re selling the store, and in part this is the reason,” said Dolores Cabrera, who owns Kokonet, an Internet storefront near the Vatican.

Half of Cabrera’s prospective clients either don’t have their passport with them or are unwilling to show it, she said.

Enforcement is spotty at many cafes, however, and besides cyber-cafe owners and civil libertarians, the law appears to bother only people who fear scrutiny by the authorities, such as illegal immigrants.

Angela De Angelis, 21 and a student using a cyber-cafe near the Vatican, was dubious about the law’s value. “I think it’s all right if it serves to protect us, though sincerely, I can’t see how it’s useful,” she said.

Italy is the only European Union country to require Internet cafes to record ID information on clients, said Richard Nash, secretary general of EuroISPA, which represents Internet providers in Europe.

Non-member Switzerland, however, does require people who go online at cyber-cafes to show IDs, according to Robin Gross, of the U.S. civil liberties group IP Justice.

Several Asian countries and cities, most prominently China and including the Indian technology hub of Bangalore, require registration at cyber-cafes.

But the leaders of some of those nations tend to be thinking at least as much about inhibiting speech as preventing terror attacks.

In Vietnam, Internet cafes also are required to block access to Web sites deemed subversive or pornographic.

The Internet’s potential as a terrorist tool was highlighted in 2002 by the abduction and murder in Pakistan of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. His abductors used e-mail to send demands and photos.

However, those messages were traced to a computer in a private home, not an Internet cafe. Pakistan does not require cyber-cafe users to register.

Daniele Capezzone, a leader of Italy’s Radical Party, which campaigns on human and civil rights issues, opposes the law.

He explained why he thinks it has stirred little debate: “Two reasons: one, the political class isn’t talking about it, and two, the media hasn’t shined a light on it.”

Cyber-cafe owners who rely in large part on a clientele that may not be in the country legally often opt to turn a blind eye.

“Fifty percent of the people who come for Internet don’t want to show their document,” Sohel said, opening his registry book and pointing to where a few clients among those who used the computers left their names but not their passport numbers. As for successfully photocopying IDs, he said customer compliance is rare.

Giuseppe Italia, whose office at Rome’s central police station oversees the application of the law in Rome, acknowledges that cyber-cafes that cater to immigrants might not be complying consistently.

Sabino Acquaviva, a sociologist at the University of Padua who specializes in terrorism, says compliance is haphazard. “People either won’t register their documents … or will show fake ones,” he said. “I think this law is useless.”