Transcrime’s Alignment with Europe’s Security Priorities

On 18 July, ahead of her re-election as President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen presented her programme for the next five years to the European Parliament plenary. Amid increasing external and internal criminal threats to democratic values, the rule of law, and the free market, her speech primarily focused on measures to strengthen Europe’s defence. This provides Transcrime with an opportunity to assess our alignment with European priorities in criminological analysis and needs for innovative tools to enhance the capacity of public and private actors in combating criminal activities. Key highlights from the President’s statement include:

“Security is not only about external threats. Cyber and hybrid threats are growing. Organised criminal networks are infiltrating our economy; most of them use corruption. They are causing fear and innocent people’s death with their brutal violence. They earn enormous amounts of money from drug trafficking, ransomware, fraud, trafficking in human beings and they are not limited by national borders. It is necessary that we respond to this growing threat on a European level. We must make sure that police can work across Europe without borders. This is why I will propose to double Europol’s staff and strengthen its mandate. I want Europol to become a truly operational police agency.”

Criminal infiltration into the legitimate economy represents the evolved form of organised crime, and our recent Conference, organised in conjunction with the Italian Association of Prefects (ANFACI), explored the need for joint action combining prosecution strategies, prefects’ restrictive measures, scientific research and the role of private actors. The innovative approach proposed by Transcrime is to map the threats, vulnerabilities and impact of organised crime infiltration at macro (territories), meso (sectors) and micro (perpetrators and victims) levels in order to provide specific solutions. In the framework of several European and national projects, we integrate our targeted risk indicators into AI-powered tools, able to unravel complex ownership structures, expose suspicious links and flag risks of financial crime activities (such as our DATACROS tool), corruption (KLEPTOTRACE and FALCON projects), human trafficking and labour exploitation (INVERT tools); and the same approach can be applied to several areas of organised crime investigation (e.g. against waste crime, as we are exploring in the EMERITUS project). Learn more about our past projects and research on organised crime and criminal infiltration into the economy:

• MORE (Modelling and mapping the risk of Serious and Organised Crime infiltration in legitimate businesses across European territories and sectors)
• Organised Crime Portfolio (OCP)
• The infiltration of organised crime into the Lombardy economy
• … List of all Transcrime projects

“We see more and more reporting on what some call a mental health crisis. We need to get to the bottom of this. I believe social media, and excessive screen time and addictive practices, have played their part. […] We will tackle the plague of cyber-bullying. We will take action against the addictive design of some platforms. And we will convene the first-ever European-wide enquiry on the impact of social media on the wellbeing of young people.”

The role of social media has become a leitmotif in many areas of criminological research. It is used to coerce victims into criminal activities, from human trafficking (which we are studying in the INVERT and VANGUARD projects) to the proliferation of illegal online markets (such as the online sale of counterfeit medicines, analysed in our CAPSULE report). Also, as highlighted in the statement, we must not underestimate their role in the commodification of crimes and in spreading models of violence, contributing to the recent increase in violent crimes among juveniles (as explained in our report on Juvenile deviance in Italy).

“We must prevent hostile foreign actors from interfering in our democratic processes, undermining them and, ultimately, destroying them. To do this, we must take strong measures at European level. […] The EU needs its own dedicated structure for countering foreign information manipulation and interference. It will pool all expertise and link up and coordinate with existing national agencies. […] EU must support an independent press, continue to ensure rules are observed by digital giants, and further encourage media literacy programmes.”

Crimes can originate from social media not only as propagators of violent models but also of and misinformation. Numerous examples from global news, such as the escalation of political polarisation and related violence in the United States, show this. Fake news undermines the credibility of institutions and is often broadcast by disinformation campaigns staged by foreign states aimed at weakening Europe. Within the EU-project FERMI, we study fake news and their sources, to provide a powerful tool for identifying disinformation patterns and anticipating disinformation-driven criminal activities.

“Intelligence and detection capabilities must be bolstered, together with the ability to act and impose sanctions. The Shield will take into account recommendations from the work of the special committees on foreign interference, to better protect our democracies. There is an urgent need to provide the European Union with powerful cyber-defence tools, to impose transparency on foreign funding of our public life as a common rule, but also to guarantee a reliable information framework.

[…] European democracy must be more participative, more vibrant. Civil society must be better supported and defended. I know I can count on your support to realise this major plan to defend European democracy. But we will also step up our work on defending all parts of our democracy. We will protect our free media and civil society. The rule of law and the fight against corruption will be at the heart of our work. We will strengthen all of our tools and we will step up our enforcement.“

The fight against corruption, both within the Union and at transnational level, is the focus of many of the projects we are involved in, such as the FALCON project, which aims to define a framework for intelligence on corruption, including the mapping of trends and modi operandi of corrupt activities. The KLEPTOTRACE project, which we are coordinating, is providing law enforcement agencies and authorities with new technologies to detect and combat high-level corruption, also building on DATACROS results, as well as enabling more effective enforcement of international sanctions, a key deterrent in the Union’s foreign policy to protect democratic values. And once again, the digital environment is reshaping patterns of corruption: in the RESPOND project, we are analysing contemporary forms of political influence, exploring how established and emerging digital technologies are intertwined with political corruption and how they enhance anti-corruption and pro-integrity strategies.

“Democracy is our common treasure. It is the forum in which our differences and disagreements can be voiced. And it is as vital as it is fragile. For a very long time, we took it for granted. We became democrats of comfort. But today our democracies are under threat. For more than two years, Russia has been relentlessly waging war on European soil, in Ukraine. Throughout the EU and within our institutions, our services and journalists – whose work I wish to commend here – have been uncovering cases of spying, cyber-attacks, corruption and disinformation by foreign actors, in particular the Russians and Chinese. The threat level and the level of hybrid attacks have not been so high for decades. At the Commission, we are very much aware of this and have been taking responsible action for several years.”

Innovative technologies and solutions developed by Transcrime benefit not only public authorities and law enforcement agencies but also investigative journalism. In many of our projects, we work with national and international investigative journalism organisations both in designing the functionalities of the tools we develop and in supporting them in the investigative phase, e.g. to uncover cases of transnational corruption and sanctions evasion. Stay tuned for upcoming major developments in this direction.

The above is just an overview of some of the projects Transcrime is involved in to research and combat organised crime and to safeguard national and European security. For a more complete list, please visit the projects page.