It is called the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The risk, however, is that forces outside the Italian state become resilient. As the government prepares to lay down EU funds for the recovery, the Commander General of the Carabinieri Teo Luzi sounds an alarm bell.
Organized crime has set its sights on the 209 billion euro loot to restart the country, warns Luzi in an interview with the Messenger. In the viewfinder, explains the commander making him a quote from Draghi, there is the “good debt” of the Italians. “We have been engaged for some time in complex patrimonial investigations, which are an integral part of the” investigative culture “of the weapon – assures Luzi, who rattles off the numbers – last June, the ROS military carried out a patrimonial measure against the top of the clan operating in the Salerno area, in Sarno, seizing assets for 2 million euros.
In the last 5 years we have seized and confiscated assets for over 12 billion euros: an enormous value that gives us the size of the mafia infiltration in the legal economy of our country “. Hence the Italian choice to join an EU architecture designed to prevent damage to the EU budget, the European Public Prosecutor Office (Eppo). It was not an easy summer for Italian law enforcement and the weapon is no exception, admits Luzi.
It is imperative to raise the safety bar in light of the new risk fronts opened by the pandemic. This is the case of cyber threats, which culminated in the ransomware attack that sent the servers of the Lazio region into a tailspin, touching a nerve in the public administration. Together with the Postal Police, the Carabinieri gave their contribution to strengthen the defenses.
Luzi says: “The weapon makes use of an articulated structure, made up of the ROS Telematic Investigations Department at a central level and by specialized sections and referents at the peripheral level”. But the first remedy to lower the level of risk and raise awareness of the favorite victims of hacker attacks: Italian companies. “With this in mind, we have activated a number of collaborations with Confindustria, Confapi and Confcommercio, which include the commitment of the Weapon also in terms of security awareness, precisely to draw attention to the needs for the protection of corporate information assets”.
Then, no less pressing, there are the threats of public order. And therefore the Green Pass affair, and the controversies, sometimes resulting in violent protests, against the green card introduced by the government to restrict access to jobs and services to those who refuse to get the vaccine. “The checks are in progress – the Commander General reassured – we use electronic devices already supplied to our crews: tablets with operational functions, on which the government App has been installed that allows immediate verification of certificates”.
The golden rule in the control phase, in the case of the Carabinieri entrusted to the Nas and the Stations, is “common sense”, says Luzi. But also the intransigence with those who, from now on, decide to openly violate the rules of contrasting Covid. It happened in a striking way during the rave party in Viterbo this summer, it will not have to repeat itself: “The web patrol has been enhanced to intercept the movements of masses of young people in time”, closes the commander, “there are no free zones and evictions they are a duty “.
