Officers arrived at the first of four schools in Ricina, in Italy's Marche region, and searched it for most of one working day. The objects under suspicion are computers. No individual computer is accused of anything; the concern is the company the machines keep. The group was investigated in its usual meeting place, which is a school.
The officers worked in pairs and displayed laminated credentials at the gate, twice, to a secretary who had already read them the first time. Small talk at the gate lasted eleven seconds and concerned parking. The group was found at its assigned desks, in its ordinary teaching-day arrangement. In local schools this is where groups assemble; the room is designed for it.
We opened our tally when the first camera flash fired, at 09:47, and closed it at 17:04, at the gate. The day produced seventeen computers, seventeen individual portraits, and two group photographs: one at the start, to establish that the group existed; one at the end, to confirm it had not dissolved while under observation. It had not. Each computer then received a numbered seal; the seals were issued in consecutive order, which makes the seals a group, the day's second, and the only one nobody photographed. The school secretary apologized nine times during the search; six apologies concerned the corridor, two its smell, one the apologizing. She then asked whether nine was a normal number, and apologized for asking.
"Every machine in that room was bought on the same day, with the same signature, from the same supplier," said Grazia Mancini, the school's systems coordinator, watching through the door's window. "Of course they know each other. We introduced them ourselves. They have never spent a night apart." Sandro Bontà, the caretaker who had unlocked the laboratory, was calmer. "They ask who is responsible for the group. The computers cannot answer. So we answer for them, once a year, on the custody form. They have never objected. The custody form has never been searched."
At 16:58 the last seal was cut and the computers were returned to their assigned desks, facing one another, as found. By 17:02 the group had re-formed, without instruction. Three schools remain on the schedule; staff at the second have already opened a waiting list, which is a queue for the queue. Its computers, a teacher there confirms, have also been seen together.
