New allegations of Vatican wiretaps

An Italian weekly magazine has branded an alleged surveillance campaign by the Holy See as a “Vatican Big Brother” operation that included more than a year of widespread wiretapping and the monitoring of personal movements by officials within the Vatican.

Panorama said in a front-page story last week that the Vatican’s Gendarmeria, headed by former Italian secret service agent Domenico Giani, tapped phones and read the emails of Church officials as part of an investigation into the so-called Vatileaks scandal – an investigation made at the behest of Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone.

The Vatican’s chief spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, has dismissed claims of long-term and extensive surveillance, saying that only a few phones were tapped at the request of the Vatican judiciary, and not of Cardinal Bertone.

But Panorama responded that according to its sources in the Vatican, the surveillance began in August 2011 – several months prior to news of the Vatileaks scandal in January last year and the arrest of Pope Benedict’s former butler Paolo Gabriele in May 2012.

“Everyone was spied on in the Vatican,” said Panorama’s Vatican expert Ignazio Ingrao, who added that surveillance is ongoing as investigators continue to search for evidence of wrongdoing in the leaking of official documents.

Panorama has further claimed that the Vatican police work closely with the secretariat and that its sources say Vatican police have amassed “an enormous quantity of data” about personal phone calls, movements and contacts within the Vatican in its archives.

Such a trove of data could cast a long shadow on the upcoming papal conclave later this month. [More]

SOURCE:

UCA News