Italian Mafia make merry amidst the COVID-19 pandemic
Publisher
Global Views 360
Publication Date
August 10, 2020
URL
Logo of The Godfather (a movie made on Italian Mafia) | Source: Wikimedia
Italy was the first European nation to encounter the coronavirus and it still is one of the worst hit nations in Europe. The country has been battling with an economic decline and rising unemployment for a few years now. However, the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the country was like rubbing salt in Italy’s wounds.
The strict lockdown imposed by the government in Italy has had an adverse effect on a lot of people particularly the small scale and the medium scale business owners. Thus, a lot of people in Italy have resorted to desperate measures. The Italian mafia have made merry of the situation by providing these people with the much-needed aid they have been looking for.
Even as the country struggles to pull itself together, the mafia have made inroads in acquiring influence over the locals by distributing food packets to poor families with no source of income. There have been videos surfacing from the southern regions which suggest that the mafia have been actively involved in delivering essential items to the people.
In Palermo, a mafia gang member, who has been distributing food to the poor, says "People ring me and they cry over the phone,". He further tells, "They say their children can't eat. A young woman has been calling me every single day. She has five kids and doesn't know how to feed them."
However, the Italian mafia has been employing the tactics of exploiting vulnerability of the locals in the face of economic crisis for a long time. The COVID-19 pandemic was yet another opportune moment for them to capitalise.
"The mafia has never done anything out of generosity. That concept doesn't exist for them," says Enza Rando who works for an anti-mafia organisation. "All they know is I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine."
A report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC), based on virtual round table discussion between top anti mafia officials and activists suggests that the healthcare sector as well as the manual laborers and service staff who work mostly cash jobs are the most vulnerable to the mafia influence during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As per the national anti-corruption authority ANAC the mafia corruption has been a big setback to the COVID-hit Italian economy. "They are taking advantage of the emergency situations like the current one, with devastating effects on the economic system and on healthy businesses, already hard hit by the crisis," said ANAC President Francesco Merlon.
Sergio Nazzaro, a journalist, writer and adviser to the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission says, ”The people who are jobless don’t care about the mafia, corruption or anything, but they see the state only talking, and from the mafia (they see) money, and I fear that at the end of all this we are going to see how much the mafia managed to buy while we were in crisis.” He stresses that the state will have to provide economic stability to the people if it hopes to eliminate the mafia influence.
Father Luigi Ciotti, an Italian priest and well-known anti-mafia activist pointed out three key areas that need to be monitored for mafia activity during the pandemic. The first is the increase in drug trafficking. The second one is new products like face masks, disinfectants etc which are suddenly in demand and provide heavy profits and third the predatory money lending.
It is quite clear that the Italian government needs to come up with strong economic reforms that ensure stability and security for its people if it hopes to counter the mafia influence. Otherwise, the mafia will always be there to trap vulnerable people by proving to be their benefactors in the short run only to exploit at a later stage.
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WhatsApp's New Privacy Policy: Collecting Metadata and Its Implications
According to WhatsApp’s new privacy policy, the app is set to collect “only” user’s Metadata. Metadata can reveal a lot more than merely the app usage of a person. Former NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker stated, “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata you don’t really need content.”
This article explores the ways in which WhatsApp is underselling the true estimation of the significance of Metadata.
Facebook owned WhatsApp recently announced the update of its privacy policy terms. 8th of February, 2021 was initially set as the deadline for users to either accept the new privacy policy or delete their account. By this time, most of us have already witnessed or been a part of the backlash that WhatsApp is experiencing. LocalCircles conducted a survey and the results indicated that 15% of India’s users are likely to move away entirely from the app while 36% will drastically reduce the usage and 67% of users are likely to discontinue chats with WhatsApp business accounts.
To reinstall trust in its users, WhatsApp released a clarification stating that the new policy update doesn’t compromise privacy of messages with friends and family. Furthermore, it explains that the update includes changes related to WhatsApp business accounts are optional too.
However, owing to severe backlash, WhatsApp has pushed the deadline to May 15 while they further clarify their policy updates.
It is true that WhatsApp cannot read our messages as it is end-to-end encrypted which implies that only a message’s sender and receiver can read it. The updated privacy policy intends to alert users that some businesses would soon be using Facebook-servers to store messages with their customers. By accepting the new privacy policy, users will be allowing WhatsApp to reserve all rights to collect your data and share it with the expansive Facebook and Instagram networks ‘regardless of whether you have profiles on those apps.’
By using WhatsApp, you may now be sharing your usage data, your phone’s unique identifier, your location when the location service is enabled, among several other types of metadata. A culmination of all your metadata is linked to your identity.
The value of metadata has been underestimated since the term isn’t clearly understood. Metadata is data about our data. For instance, in a cell phone conversation, the conversation itself isn’t metadata but everything except that is metadata. Data regarding who you called, how long you spoke for, where you were when you placed the call, where the other person on the line was and the time you placed the call. Consider a situation when every time you made a call to someone, you had to inform a particular person about who you called, how long you spoke for, when and where and all other details except the content spoken. This applies for every single call and everyone else’s metadata is also being recorded. The person owning the metadata can analyze and tell a lot about your personal life. Who you work with, who you spend time with, who you are close to, where you are at particular times and so on…
Kurt Opsahl, in his post in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gives an example of how companies and governments collect intimate details about your life with the disguised use of the word called metadata. The following examples are an excerpt of his article:
“They know you rang a phone sex service at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. They know that you called suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge.
They know you spoke with an HIV testing service, then your doctor, then your health insurance company in the same hour.
They know you called a gynaecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local Planned Parenthood's number later that day. But nobody knows what you spoke about.”
Metadata provides more than required context to know some of the most intimate and personal details of your lives. When this data is correlated with the records of other phone calls, one can easily obtain a lot more data and track our daily routines. This is merely about phone calls. WhatsApp includes a lot more features and will collect metadata of chats, businesses and money transactions.
In WhatsApp’s words:
“We collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information. This includes information about your activity (such as how you use our Services, how you interact with others using our Services, and the like), log files, and diagnostic, crash, website, and performance logs and reports.”
In addition to this, WhatsApp also collects information about IP address, OS, browser information and phone number.
Stanford’s computer scientists conducted an analysis to understand the extent of intrusion of privacy using metadata. The scientists built an app for smartphones. The app was developed to retrieve metadata of calls and text messages from more than 800 volunteers’ phone logs. The researchers received records of more than 250,000 calls and 1.2 million texts. Their inexpensive analysis revealed personal details of several people like their health records. Researchers were also able to learn that one of their participants owned an AR semi-automatic rifle with only metadata.
Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the National Security Agency once stated that “the U.S. government kill[s] people based on metadata.”
In 2016, Facebook was involved in the infamous data privacy scandal which centered around collection of personal data of over 87 million people by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting and strategic analyst firm. The organization harvested user data for targeted advertising, particularly political advertising during the 2016 U.S. election. While the central offender was Cambridge Analytica, the apparent indifference for data privacy to Facebook facilitated Cambridge Analytical and several other organizations.
In June 2018, Facebook confirmed that it was sharing data with at least 4 Chinese companies, Huawei, Oppo, Lenovo and TCL. Facebook was under scrutiny from the U.S. intelligence agencies on security issues as they claimed that the data with the Chinese telecommunication companies would provide an opportunity for a foreign espionage.
In September 2019, there were reports that the Indian government contemplated making it mandatory for companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, to share the public data of users.
The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) was planning on issuing new guidelines under the Information Technology Act which according to which tech giants would have been required to share freely available data or the public information that they collate in the course of their operations, including traffic, buying and illness patterns.
Europe is exempted from WhatsApp’s new privacy policy as EU antitrust authorities fined Facebook 110 million euros for misleading the regulators during the takeover of WhatsApp in 2014. EU’s strict privacy laws empowers regulators to fine up to 4% of global annual revenue of the companies that breach the bloc’s rules.
Your Metadata is extremely personal. By giving WhatsApp the authority to access it, you are giving access to several other organizations, businesses and it also makes you more vulnerable to third-party hackers and trackers. WhatsApp has given multiple assurances about its updated privacy policy being noninvasive. However, most of these assurances are cleverly worded and misleading statements. It is important to read through the fine print of the new policy before accepting it.
