A lesson from this lockdown, and from all state-sponsored and -enforced restrictions on free interaction and commerce between individuals: these are opportunities for crooks, charlatans and hackers to make big inroads into the lives of ordinary people.
With government, lockdowns are just another chance to expand its power and control over humans (which even democracies appear to despise), and ~ for criminals ~ to find more prey for their schemes and scams.
- Search engines (even ones that tout concern over your “privacy”) are totally compromised now: put in any search term(s) and the first page will be nothing but links to commercial sites (realtors, big-box stores, the like) that want to sell you something; if you’re researching, say, “Veterans Administration scandals”, you will only get pages that take you to government or corporate media sites that are guaranteed to dispense the official slant and party line on the subject;
- Hackers have reached a new level of sophistication in tracking and exploiting your web surfing: after visiting Amazon for a quick look at a book, a few hours later my Junk folder was filled with phishing messages purporting to be from Amazon, entreating me to click on a link so they could steal my login information;
- Credit card fraud: on April 20, 6 weeks into my state’s lockdown, I was hit with the worst fraud I’ve ever had, after purchasing merchandise on a site whose mission is one that Israeli Firsters have been trying to silence for decades. I don’t believe for a second that that topic and the fraud were unrelated;