Criminals work hard to re-invest their money in the upper world. Once they successfully do that punishing them can become very hard. Free, democratic and open societies are far more vulnerable to this than dictatorships, there you are either part of the 'in-group' or you're going to be hunted.
An open society makes the assumption that people play by the rules and that those that do not will be caught and can be punished. But in reality that assumption does not hold true. Witness the extent to which the Mafia has been able to ruin your country. They've managed to infiltrate the highest echelons of politics, live like kings and in general are so far above the law that it's farcical.
Punishment is for small time criminals. So yes, hackers, burglars, extortionists and so on stand some chance of being caught. But the big fish (in this case, the bosses of the hackers) will likely get away with it while some patsy does time.
Italy is the country where I live, but I'm not sure I'd call it "mine". If it were mine, I'd run it differently :-) I am not a citizen in any event.
I think you're wrong in any event: the more open and well run a society is, the harder it is for mafias to really take root. That's why they are stronger in places like Italy than in, say, Sweden: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_S...
And truth be told, there has been progress in the fight against the Mafia, just that it's a long slog, not something that's going to be fixed from one day to the next.
It's frustrating because Italy is one of the most beautiful countries in Europe and has many nice people living there.
Funny you should mention Sweden, they actually have quite a bit of gang activity and organized crime there. It's not as visible as the Mafia and definitely not as organized but being an 'open society' is definitely perceived as being ripe for the plucking by the not-so-nice elements in our world.
I find it favorable to compare with the other opposite: dictatorships. There you usually have very little small time crime, all the crummy criminals are caught and punished (usually very harshly). But the government is the elephant in the room in those countries, they are the real criminals.
I think that crime is somehow systemic, that it is almost impossible to have an open society without having crime in the populace and as that model shifts towards a more closed society the crime shifts with it until the majority of it is found amongst those that rule.
There simply is an element of society that will try to game any model in such a way that they maximize their pay-off while minimizing their potential exposure to hard work. Parasitic behavior. And being a parasite works, it's a good niche to be in and plenty of people that find the regular roads to riches closed to them for whatever reason figure that they're going to get theirs no matter what.
Regular warrants given after the attack (to get records or add logging and records) and no pre-existing logging on the network (enforced on providers, or done by a central entity with or without legal permission) makes it really hard to track down attacks which are short-lived, highly mobile, etc.
I'm not sure where the current, ideal, and historical tradeoffs have been for this.
