Salvini: from the middle finger to the Gregoretti question. But are we sure that the real problem is not the Rousseau platform?

While the social media is photographing a girl who, traveling by air next to a sleeping Salvini, takes a selfie with her middle finger on display, arousing the anger of the Northern League people and the hilarity of that of the sardines ( on the point, the undersigned remains cautious: on the other hand, speaking more generally, between the banana of Cattelan, and the sacrilegious blasphemous distortion of the Madonna and child by Bellini, in which the Virgin Mary was depicted with the face of Pamela Mastropietro - the eighteen year old Roman woman raped, killed, disjointed, surgically de-peeled, skinned, skinned, bloodless, removed from all her internal organs, washed with bleach, put in two trolleys and abandoned on the side of the road on January 30 of last year in that of Macerata - and the little Jesus with that of the executioner of the aforementioned - the Nigerian Innocent Oseghale, condemned, for the aforementioned events, to life imprisonment, although still only in the first degree - proved himself drawn to the extreme the wide range of meanings or representations to which, in one sense or another, the human mind can reach), the political leader of the Movement 5Stelle, announces to Porta a Porta that he wants to vote for the authorization to proceed towards the head of the Carroccio on the case Gregoretti ("We in January or February of this year - maybe next, ed - we will be called to recognize the prevailing public interest in blocking a ship: but we are talking about a ship blocked in July when the other European countries that were called offered to redistribute migrants")

Moreover, doing so a few hours after his return from Libya where, as Italian Foreign Minister, he had met at Sarraj and Haftar, forgetting, probably, that the real criminals were and are precisely those who, from the Libyan coasts, leave undisturbed towards the boot, favoring human trafficking or migrant smuggling, with all that follows also in terms of safety¹ internal to our country.

Well, since the law is - or should be the same for everyone -, even if there are undeniable doubts related to the system that is called to enforce it, an issue on which we should also return to reflect, precisely in the public interest , is that of the Rousseau platform.

As known, on it, the reference point of the Movimento5Stelle, each of its members can "express his ideas and support the challenges he believes in, proposing bills, voting on the laws proposed by other users"Who believes"more useful or urgent, and bringing issues of collective interest to attention”Of the relative Spokespersons², in a thin line between the freedom of political parties (which is recognized as a privatistic structure) to organize their internal life, according to rules that must certainly not be subject to external scrutiny by third parties (meeting them, as the only limits , of course, those established by common civil law and by prohibitions imposed by criminal law, in which cases, of course, the use of external authorities would become obligatory), and the so-called prohibition of the imperative mandate (sanctioned by art.67 of our Constitution and which, incidentally, Di Maio himself would like to abolish) according to which “Each member of Parliament represents the nation and carries out his duties without a mandate".

Well, it is not by chance that, in some way, the current existence of the government in office depends and, therefore, in a perspective of coherence and due criticism, it is necessary to go back to asking certain questions, legitimate and legitimate to the era, and even more today, in the light of the statements, mentioned above, of the political leader of the Grillino movement.

As will be remembered, in fact, on September 3, 2019, the voting took place on this platform Online in order to listen to the thought of the "base" of the movement in question, following the government crisis in our country in those weeks, with the subsequent consultations of the President of the Republic, Sergio Mattarella, aimed at verifying the possibility of forming a alternative majority, thus avoiding early return to the polls.

The question submitted to the relative members had been: "Do you agree that the 5-star movement will start a government, together with the Democratic Party, chaired by Giuseppe Conte?"³.

Of this vote, not only was the importance stressed ("The 5 Star Movement has already won: the whole world awaits our vote and we are not giving up on direct participation"⁴), just by the political leader of the 5 Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio, but even his binding character: the latter, already on 27 August 2019, for example, had in fact stated that "At the end of this path there will be a proposal for a government project that will have been shared among the political forces that intend to enter the majority. Before being submitted to the President of the Republic, this proposal will be voted online on Rousseau by members of the 5 star Movement. Only if the vote is positive will the proposed government project be supported by the 5 star Movement. The vote should take place within the next week. Members of the 5 star Movement have and will always have the last word"⁵.

To then return to declare, at the end of the same that "In less than a month a government crisis was resolved through a different method and not in the secret rooms"⁶.

So things, it emerges with evidence, then, that what was decided through the vote Online mentioned above, has clearly gone beyond the simple internal life of the political movement in question (not to be underestimated, in this regard, the statements made by the newly appointed prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, who, on the eve of the same, had harangue the Grillino people called to express their opinion on the platform in question, declaring that "The reasons for perplexity do not escape me, but I remind you that the M5S has always said clearly that, if it had not had the majority, it would have worked with the forces available to do it carrying on the program. I tell you not to keep these ideas, these dreams in the drawer "⁷, with a clear intention of orienting the vote) and instead went to affect the fate of an entire nation and that, consequently, the interest of any other citizen, internal or external to the same, or even registered with another party, to understand if the aforementioned (voting) took place according to criteria of transparency and legality. Precisely in respect, also, of that party pluralism, and therefore of interaction of thought between members of different sides, which certainly constitutes the lifeblood of the democratic method.

On the transparency and legality of the online voting of 3 September last

Already at the time the doubts had been solicited not only by "simple" activists of the 5 Star Movement, but also, for example, by one of her own senators, Elena Factors, which had highlighted, among several anomalies, that "to some who managed to vote he asked for the identity confirmation text message, to others not, thus revealing two different levels of security for the determination of the identity of which neither the origin nor the reason nor the implications are understood", also stating that"There is something to review, direct democracy is a serious matter subject to in-depth studies in universities but which cannot coincide with a telematic tool for the most part questionable in its functioning"⁸. Rather important statements, which in themselves should have alerted or, at least, "intrigued" some Public Prosecutor, for the obvious, potential, underlying implications.

Rather symptomatic of a general malfunction of the platform in question at the time of the aforementioned vote, it was also what happened to former senator Giorgio Pizzol, for some time a militant in the ranks of the Italian Socialist Party and then of the Italian Socialist Democratic Party, who subsequently approached the Movimento 5 Stelle which, even during the live broadcast of "L'aria che tira", broadcast on the television channel "La7", had shown the difficulty in being able to vote for his dissent, having had to access the platform several times before to have his vote accepted.

The story was then taken up by some newspapers, on which we read that "(...) Immediately afterwards, Pizzol in front of his computer showed Rousseau's page where he expressed his preference by exclaiming that fortunately "They haven't chased me yet". A polemical joke that made the guests in the studio and the presenter Myrta Merlino smile.

It is at this point that something on the platform goes wrong. The former senator clicks firmly on the "NO" but incredibly, when confirming the preference, the site freezes so much that the word "error, try later" appears. Bewilderment in the studio where laughs and ironic applause broke out with the presenter, appalled by the incident, who remained silent for a few seconds.

"They prevent me from voting NO "Pizzol says unhappy while Merlin invites him to try again. The second attempt also fails"⁹.

Difficult to think of a simple overload of the system, since, as highlighted on the blog of the same 5 Star Movement¹⁰, the news was even dismissed as "fake news" according to which "The Rousseau platform is unprepared to handle high traffic for voting on the Government Project": It was specified that"Thanks to the improvement of the infrastructure and an ad hoc allocation of hardware resources which are increased in proportion to the needs of the vote, the new voting area, in use for 5 months, has shown good performance under load conditions. During the vote for confirmation of Luigi di Maio as political leader, 56.127 people voted and the system was subject to 3 DDos attacks which were foiled. The performance of the voting area remained intact, apart from a slight slowdown lasting less than 30 minutes.

During the voting process, despite the attacks, the server's time to process requests (latency) was: maximum 71 milliseconds in half the cases, maximum 207 milliseconds in 90% of cases and 409 milliseconds in 99% of cases. We handled an average of 116.25 https requests per second, with peaks of 305 requests per second during the voting peak (excluding DDoS). Considering the attacks, the attempted attacks and the legitimate errors, we can say that we had no mistake in processing the votes ".

If we consider that, in the vote of 3 September last, 79.634 members had to vote, spread over a rather large period of time (from 9 to 18), the reason for this delay is doubtful, however, denounced by numerous other users.

Furthermore, to increase the shadows on the transparency of these votes, the declarations of Gianni Cuozzo, expert of cyber security and consultant forintelligence military from different NATO countries. In one of his interviews¹¹, in which he replied in detail, and often in the opposite direction, precisely to what is reported in the 5-Star blog regarding possible fake-news (see what was said above), he stated, among other things, that "Many of the attacks we talked about are targeted, therefore not replicable on a large scale, but they can target particular individual users such as those with administrative privileges within the platform. Furthermore, there are "elevation of privileges" techniques with which, taking advantage of errors in the code, you can turn a simple user into a user with administrative privileges. From there, through "escaping" techniques, you can go from the platform to attack the server in its entirety and then go to search for the database and alter its values. Obviously we are talking about attacks that are not easy to perform, but they are possible. Another way to manipulate the outcome of the votes is to attack the database in which these votes are saved. Each time a user makes a vote, a table is populated in a database and, to analyze the vote, a request can be made to the various tables of the voting users. If altered, these tables on the server can expose altered data to the Rousseau administrators themselves. And nobody would notice. Statistics tell us that about 70% of those who suffer an attack do not know that they are under attack or that they have been under attack".

To the specific question, then, if any illegitimate modification could also take place "from the inside", without users noticing, the answer had been clear enough"Absolutely yes. From the inside, an administrator with the right levels of privileges can, through simple scripts, overwrite the database tables as he wishes and alter the result of the vote. So when the results are produced, being anonymous, nobody can realize the thing".

However, for all the above, it would be of undoubted interest to understand, even for the protection of those who expressed their opinion in regular elections, as held on March 4, 2018, if the vote on the Rousseau platform, for the effects that it then produced (i.e. the vote of confidence, in agreement between Movimento5Stelle and the Democratic Party, to the current government), took place correctly and free from any shadow. And Minister Di Maio, political leader of the Grillini, should be the first to claim it, precisely by virtue of the same principle invoked against the former Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini. Who knows.