Italy is taking its crusade against BitTorrent sites to an unprecedented level. The authorities have moved against the general purpose proxy site proxyitalia.com because it could be used by Italians to access BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. Following this logic they will also have to censor thousands of other proxy sites and ban all VPN services, or shut down the Internet entirely.

After an Italian court ordered all ISPs to block The Pirate Bay in 2008, this year the authorities shifted their focus to making BTjunkie unavailable too.

This week it turned out that not all Internet providers were complying with this second court order, which prompted the Sardinian prosecutor to sue these ISPs for aiding and abetting criminal copyright infringement.

But even if all ISPs block BTjunkie there are still several ways to access the site from Italy, through a proxy site for example.

When BTjunkie’s owner heard that Italy had blocked his site he decided to register the domain proxyitalia.com. “I’m disappointed with the Italian judicial system,” he told TorrentFreak at the time. “We will do our best to fight for Italian people’s right to communicate.”

A few hours later the new domain was hosting a general purpose proxy service which allows Italians to browse the Internet from a foreign IP-address. The added benefit is of course that censored websites such as BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay are readily accessible. Or were accessible, we should say.

Yesterday the Italian authorities decided to step up their anti-piracy actions and block access to the proxy site as well. The Guardia di Finanza (GdF), the Italian police tasked with cybercrime cases, took out the site after a request from Cagliari deputy prosecutor Giangiacomo Pilia.

According to the authorities proxyitalia.com was acting illegally by allowing Italians access to BTjunkie and The Pirate Bay. This far-reaching intervention means that practically all proxy sites and VPN services located outside of Italy can be branded as illegal.

Following the logic of the Italian prosecutor means that the authorities will have to add thousands of sites and services to their blacklist in order to fully block the two torrent sites. Even then, it takes only a few hours to set up a new proxy site, so this cat and mouse game will never end.

BTjunkie’s owner told TorrentFreak that he’s in utter disbelief following the latest developments in Italy. He’s not going to give up yet though, and will try once more to help out BTjunkie’s Italian users.

“I’m going to offer the same type of proxy site, but hosted at Google apps this time. Let’s see if the police will ban Google’s IP-addresses as well,” he told us.

More info on the new proxy site will become available in the days to come.