When a country hires mercenaries to server as an extra military or police force, what is the legal frame work for that? The Italian police hires a mercenary group to take down a target in Lithuania by breaking into a innocent third-party ISP, without a single document by any court.
From what I've read, they were actually trying to get back their own CNC server (which they had somehow lost access to), and the "third-party ISP" (Aruba) was co-operating with them.
I agree that the Italian ROS (which is part of the Carabinieri, a military police force that ended up being the main Italian police force because of accidents of history and a local penchant for fascism) were heavy-handed, as they are all the time. For all our crying about NSA, European law enforcement agencies are typically much worse.
I don't think the role of Aruba (the Italian ISP involved) was the one of the innocent third-party ISP. IANAL, but as far as I know, there is no "secret court" that can ask them to do that.
They did it not because of a break (or so I understand, I'll be happy to be mistaken) but, probably, "to keep the Man quiet". While understandable (to a point) this is definitely not what an "innocent third party" will do.
To me it shows a bit of naivety by the police force. Hopefully Inspector Montalbano was not in charge of this one.
I think in economies where tech is slower to adopt into the mainstream agenda, abuses like this are seen as the digital equivalent of 'reasonable force'. Where there is no existing protocol, there will be fuzzy lines and abuses in order to justify bringing criminals to justice.
