| Table of contents no. 2/2009 |
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The media and security
by Emanuela C. DEL RE |
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Answers by: Lucio CARACCIOLO, Gianni CIPRIANI,Maurizio MASCIOPINTO, Mario MORCELLINI
The questions of security, today, cannot be faced without taking into account communication. To communicate in the field of security is as crucial as elaborating strategies to fight the adversary. Actually, the communication itself constitutes a strategy – if necessary also a means of contrast – because it influences the creation of the social climate in which all the protagonists in the field of security operate.
Central questions then emerge of which, paradoxically, very little is said in an organized way, so that, as Stefano Rolando already affirmed in 2007, and is confirmed by those who write today, even the Internet is disappointing when the words “information, communication, security, citizens” are looked for on the “research motors”, because they lead to fragmented and dispersive results – food security, security devices and more – far from the precise definition one wanted... (Photo Ansa) |
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| Essays and articles |
|  | In the last ten years, the TV (public and private) and the television market have been the theatre of strong political conflict. In a recent work, two scholars have spoken of a long war that has involved the entire Country. (F. Debenetti, and A.Pilati, The thirty-year war. Politics and Television in Italy, Einandi, 2009). During the past thirty years, the principal problem was represented by the management of the public TV and by the modalities with which to advance a process of liberalization of the radio-television editorial. The Constitutional Court, with a series of sentences has accompanied the alignment of the radio-television System to the principles of the market economy, of the circulation of ideas, of the freedom of manifestation of thought. During the course of a work of adjustment of the System to the Constitutional principles, new possibilities and problems have arisen. The technology (satellite, digital) has brought fewer obstacles to a full liberalization of the emissions of the scarcity of the number of frequencies... (Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | The real awareness that the world in which we live hosts a consolidated international social fabric, made up of the poor, always poorer and the rich, always richer, is a dramatic statistical fact, which has nothing of the metaphor of the sociological categorization and even less of the philosophical concept.
The existence of a structure, in the ambit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – provided with concrete programmes for the reduction of poverty as an international objective in connection with the needs of the local and regional areas – realizes the essential strategic line of the Cooperation to the Development.
Organically, the Offices constitute a General Direction of the MAE – created on the basis of the Law N° 491/1987 – which, delineating the principles of partnership... | | | |
|  | A Society of information (SI) is that in which the creation, the distribution, the use, the integration and the manipulation of the information are activities felt to be strongly significant and which have been broadly possessed by the Society. The new technologies of information and communication hold a central position both with regard to the production and the economy in general, and for all the social aspects in their entirety. For some time now, the European Union has started, given the importance of the sector, to promote the development of the Society of information in Europe through policies and actions directed to favour the consolidation and the diffusion in the framework of the single market. In this article different aspects of this subject are explored: a subject more and more felt to be central, from the definition of the concept of the European Society of Information (SIE) with its raison d’etre, to the framework of regulations in which are included the networks and the contents of the SIE, to the possible future scenarios. (Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | Among the causes of marginalization and impoverishment of certain States, the privileged fiscal regimes are situated, at times, easy and convenient refuge of the capital of organized crime. For some time now, and even more today, with the economic crisis at a global level, the fiscally advanced States have put the fight against these elusive practices on their agenda, e.g. the transfer of capital to Countries with privileged fiscal regimes – for no valid economic reasons, but only to obtain benefits of a fiscal nature.
It is Attilio Befera, Director of the Revenues Agency, who with extreme clarity and brevity analyzes in this contribution the phenomenon in all its complexity, also in light of recent Community interventions of contrast. | | | |
|  | In a strongly globalized economy, the cipher of the new paradigm of the development is the interdependency, the multiplier of the relapses of the economic, political and cultural processes.
In this first glimpse of the 21st Century, we are witnessing an overturning of the traditional categories of the development, accompanied by an epoch-making upheaval in the geopolitical and geo-economic structures. Beside the more traditional threats, inheritance of the long transition following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the thawing of the opposing ideological blocks, today, one can add dangers of another nature, substantially characterized by the unpredictability, by the pervasiveness and by the difficulty of the deterrence. In essence, while the long fifty-year period of the Cold War was dominated by the paradigm of “reciprocal destruction” (MAD – Mutual Assured Destruction) and by a symmetry of the terror which guaranteed a relative stability of the geo-strategic scenario, today, phenomena such as terrorism of the fundamentalist matrix, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, but also the climatic changes and the pandemics constitute threats that are difficult to decode and to contain in a traditional manner. (Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | The illicit management of refuse, characterized by a complex organization and considerable economic returns, is a phenomenon not yet completely penetrated by the prevention and repression bodies of criminal activities, notwithstanding that the investigative results have traced its origin to the organized criminal activities.
The contribution furnished in this direction by Interpol has been decisive. For some time Interpol has promoted an intense activity of cooperation between the Police bodies that are employed in the fight against the phenomenon, to start from the so-called “eco-message” which puts in communication all the Police Forces involved. Of great interest then, the illustration of the Bodies of coordination between Police forces and judicial authorities, with particular regard to the Seaport project which connects the bodies of inspection and the police with specific jurisdiction over the seaport areas, and the Eurojust project which provides for work groups dedicated to environmental matters and experience of judicial cooperation. It is a Judge, an expert with a deep knowledge of a complex and delicate reality, to whom we entrust this contribution; an approach to the subject with the intention to offer our readers, in subsequent detailed studies, the most correct and comprehensive knowledge possible. (Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | Economic and strategic importance of the immigration phenomenon: an analysis and, at the same time, a warning to keep in mind in examining how population flows can be essential elements of an indirect strategy of an economic and geopolitical nature. This is certainly an original way of looking at a subject on which all and more has already been said.(Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | For some time, Governments and public opinion have paid much attention to the “Mexican question”: the drama this great Central-American Country is experiencing, gnawed by economic crisis, war between bands of narcotic traffickers and, now, by the outbreak of swine influenza. A drama that goes beyond the Mexican borders and involves, first of all, the border Countries, starting from the United States, but it can spread to Europe.
If the economic crisis and the influenza are means of preoccupation, it is the war between drug bands that devastate the Country, also due to the wealth produced by the rivers of drugs that flow through Mexico, and not only in the direction of the United States. With accuracy and a wealth of data, Guido Olimpio outlines the Mexican scenario, the implications with the neighbouring Countries, and the attempt of expansion of the drug traffic towards Europe, through the alliance of the Italian organized crime. He then goes on to analyze the instruments in the field that try to arrest the course towards the abyss and warns that to revive Mexico, the always more sophisticated systems of repression are not enough. The programmes of the Calderone chairmanship need international support and cooperation which, first of all, mean the reduction of the demand for drugs, but also the slowdown in the traffic of arms.(Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | The Russian-Georgian clash, which reached maximum tension in the August of 2008, with the entrance of the military Russian Forces into Ossetia, definitively placed world attention on the Caucasian problem. International interest for the situation in this area becomes progressively intensive in proportion to the increase of the transit of the greatest energy sources; sources which Europe, in particular, cannot do without and which, for this reason, has included Nations such as Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the “European Neighbour Policy”. The problem of the Caucasus, notwithstanding the last developments, is not recent and is not, simplistically, tied to the energy interests, but rather, has developed, through time, due to an age-old ethnic hatred. To understand this we must remember the oppression and Armenian genocide, the forced deportation of entire populations, the ethnic-religious clashes which saw Christians against Moslems, and Christians against Christians.(Photo Ansa) | | | |
|  | The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union with the annexed Warsaw Pact seemed to have decreed the extinction of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, commonly known as the NATO. Subsequent events have demonstrated not only that NATO is a vital organization, but performs a leading role in a globalized world, in which the requirement of security grows in areas that are not easily controllable. A fundamental testing ground for the future is represented by the presence of Afghanistan, which follows the intervention in Kosovo and other operations of stabilization. As one can deduce from the analysis of Professor Pasqualini, the prospects tend to broaden and the re-entry of France into the Organization is an indication.(Photo Ansa) | | | |
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| Surveys |
HISTORY
From the Archives
 | |  | The consecration of the principle of the freedom of the press, in Italy, is marked by the date 1848, the year in which the Art. 1. of the Albertino Edict sanctioned the move from “preventive censorship” to a system of ‘free press’ although subject to strict rules in the operative of the Edict itself...
....The consequent high increase which the diffusion of the press had, in particular, that periodical, able to reach more and more vast social sectors, lead the Authorities to a greater surveillance, also for reasons of public order. So it was that, in 1889, the Zanardelli code abrogated certain regulation of the Albertino Edict and, in 1889, the Crispi Law was issued, with which the penalties were tightened for solicitation and advocating or defending a crime through the means of the press.... | | | |
| Facts, Anecdotes and Legends | |  | Numerous are the legends on the agents of the Secret Services, the Israeli Mossad and likewise, the Soviet KGB. They have fed with abundance between half admissions and silences, failed operations and others conducted to a brilliant finish. Certain figures have become the essence itself of the mystic of espionage: Richard Sorge first, and Eli Cohen after. It had nothing to do with “agents who passed to the enemy”, double agents or spies for money, but with professionals at the highest level. Cohen was, in fact, Vice-Minister of the Defence of Syria, the Country on which he had been commissioned to spy. His extensively detailed information, his capacity to manipulate the top Syrian executives served Tel Aviv to inflict the toughest lesson on Syria in 1967. Cohen was discovered and hanged. He had reached such high levels within the Syrian nomenclature that he was considered untouchable. The men of Mukhabarat surprised him while he was still transmitting information by radio to the Mossad (Photo by www.elicohen.org) | | | |
CULTURE
Studies of Intelligence | |  | The culture of the Intelligence is the instrument through which we can understand the role and the work of modern Services of information and security. An instrument given by the examination of the studies and analyses of the principal think tanks, research centres, Italian and foreign Universities. This Columns Section intends, therefore, to select and periodically present the most significant studies on the subjects relative to the Intelligence structures or to those directly connected, facilitating the comprehension of the history, methodologies and functions of the most modern structures of the sector. A contribution to undo the many myths and banalities which have always accompanied the image of the Secret Services throughout the world and to acquire, on the contrary, knowledge of the role and of the work | | | |
| Reviews | |  | Cosa Nostra recounted by who lives it in an antagonistic form every day, the National Anti-mafia Prosecutor, Pietro Grasso, the man who accepted the inheritance of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and marks the continuity of enthusiasm and commitment.
An interview-book “To not Die of Mafia”, written with a great journalist, Alberto La Volpe, former-director of TG2 (TV News, Channel 2), in which the internal mechanisms and the external relations of the mafia organization, as we know them, are explained with great clarity. Grasso also helps us to understand the season of the “poisons” of Palermo, the “persecution” of Falcone, premonitory symptom of the massacres of Capaci and via D’Amelio and their valence: vendetta, prevention and destabilization. The space of time, which goes from the season of the massacres to the strategy of the “submersion”, is outlined in this book in such a way as to make well understood the capacity of infiltration and corruption of the Cosa Nostra within the society. We will not die of mafia, but the fight will still be a long one, and this book will offer a valid contribution to whoever intends to commit themselves in the fight against the mafia. | | | |
CHRONOLOGY
Organized crime
|  | We present the chronological file of the most significant arrests of the organized crime
During the last three months, followed by an evocative and colourful description of one of them. (Photo Ansa) | | | |
TERRORISM
|  | It is understood that an act of terrorism is a violent action, politically motivated, intended to strike objectives of symbolic value and destined also to intimidate a ‘targeted audience’ socially or politically connected to the primary objective.
The act of terrorism, unlike that of ‘political violence’ (carried out by individuals or groups acting ‘in the open’)and that of the ‘guerrilla ’(carried out with instruments and paramilitary logistics) is usually performed by individuals or groups who operate in secrecy or undercover, or in any event, under disguised conditions within the threatened societies”. (Photo Ansa) | | | |
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| APPENDIX
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