Cyber ​​attacks confirm the Italian technological delay – Massimo Mantellini

The story of the attack on the computer systems of the Lazio region has nothing particular. What happened tells nothing that we did not already know and that had not already been clear for years. Nothing, above all, that is not destined to repeat itself in the near future.

There is no need to be an expert in computer security, an esoteric subject on which, as always in these cases, only a handful of experts (generally completely unheard and unearthed in a hurry only on the occasion of similar emergencies), to recognize in this affair a national sentiment, clear and nefarious, unnecessarily underlined for decades and which deserves to be reaffirmed once again. This sentiment is Italy’s annoyance for all forms of innovation. Destiny has wanted that in the last two or three decades of forced innovations there have been many, many more than in the course of the entire previous century, and this sentiment has thus been severely tested.

The manifestations of such an idiosyncrasy are a kind of national DNA that anyone with a little attention will be able to recognize. As happens to the authentic distinctive features of a country, they will be recognizable everywhere: in the choices of entrepreneurs, in the words of politicians, in the laws of parliament, in the tics of intellectuals, in the tones of information, in the words and choices of the people in the square, in bars and workplaces.

A nuisance that can be summarized as follows: 1) technology is not needed 2) technology is sometimes needed but it is dangerous.

The role of politics
It is likely that the IT infrastructures of the Lazio region are part of the 95 percent of Italian public administration sites which – in the words of the innovation minister Colao a few weeks ago – are “lacking the minimum security and reliability requirements necessary to provide services and data management “. However, in this very large figure also lies the uselessness of stigmatizing too much a single even serious episode. In the case in question it will not be so useful to find a culprit or even just a scapegoat; it would be more useful to realize that no one is innocent and that the country’s basic infrastructures, which in a few decades have become digital infrastructures, are now a gigantic danger to us all. And this not because of technology or because of the “terrorists” (as Nicola Zingaretti defined them) but simply because of us, our inadequacy and our refusal to live within our time.

We have come from almost two years of great digital pressure. From the beginning of the pandemic it was clear that the response to the virus was largely based on our scientific knowledge and, above all, on the ability to collect data. It was necessary to be fast, gifted with imagination, authentic in the scientific approach to the virus: it was not to make us beautiful, it was needed to save us. In a word, it was necessary to be digital. Instead, we have often been slower and less good than the others, the various regions have often played with the numbers so as not to be disadvantaged vis-à-vis the “competitors”, politics miserably used that data to divide us and, while all this was happening, the trait fundamental, also in this case, was that of a vast diffidence towards technology, widely experienced as an obstacle.

Not even a pandemic with tens of thousands of deaths has been able to make us change our mind about it, imagine how much we will ever be interested in the fact that a cyber attack has encrypted the health file of the president of the republic (his own and that of a few million other citizens ) and then ask for a ransom in bitcoin.

If these are the premises, if this national allergy is really so widespread, who will ever be able to place some trust in the umpteenth government agency, this time for IT security, as necessary as it is probably destined to the role of extender body of indications that no one will respect? Who will ever be interested in uncovering the pot of relationships that each administration has built over the years with its IT infrastructure suppliers, all on average inadequate, often with contracts to friends and associates beyond all logic and control?

When a few years ago a meritorious parliamentary commission chaired by Paolo Coppola decided to investigate the national application of the digital administration code, the results of the hearings resembled certain dialogues in a Totò film. More than ten years had passed since those rules and no one had done practically anything about it. The only significant consequence of such a survey was, it seems to me, that Coppola was no longer a candidate in the following elections.

The answer to the question of who is interested in dealing with such matters today is obviously none, precisely because no one in the approach to innovation is innocent today: nothing can be done in spite of the saints, especially when the saints are all of us.

How then is such a situation resolved? How do we save ourselves from a pandemic or attacks ransomware, or by the next accident that digital is silently organizing us right now? How can we do this if the ruling class is what we have and if our perception of citizens is so vague and disinterested?

The answer on my own is as simple as it is obligatory. In the short term we will simply not save ourselves: or rather, we will save ourselves just a little, Italy will save a little, thanks to the technological pull of our neighboring countries, which are less and less distracted and inexperienced than us. In the medium term, the inevitable replacement of the political and entrepreneurial class will save us: the inadequacy of the current one on similar issues is currently at its zenith and will only be reduced over time. In the long run, as in all things in our life, only school and culture will save us, and therefore what we will be able to do right now to have new generations that are more curious and different from us.

We will need to train citizens of the world who are better than us, who know more than we do: to keep well planted in this country to make it a different country. Maybe not so different from before, but you are starting to prefer to look forward rather than back. Julio Cortázar wrote that “after the age of forty we keep the real face in the back of the neck, and look desperately back”.

We need a new Italy of people who, at twenty or eighty, choose to stop looking desperately back.