How did the public-school vice principal gain illegal access to Ferris Bueller's home?  He used the doggy door in the back.  I recall this funny scene from American cinema to alert my fellow Americans to the dangers of doggy doors.

You may object by saying, "I do not have a doggy door on my home!"  Really?  If you have cell phones or home computers connected to the internet, you have huge digital doggy doors through which criminals and snoopy government agencies can gain access to your privacy and your life.  Our untrustworthy news outlets have already shared with us countless stories about how large corporations have been hacked and precious bits of personal and financial information have been shared with nefarious hackers.  They're less forthcoming about the risks each of us takes with our computers.

Here comes the part that really scares me: Hannity, Limbaugh, and other conservative voices (all of whom surely mean well) advertise VPNs.  VPN stands for a Virtual Private Network.  They tell us that if we get a VPN, we will be protected from unwanted snooping of our private data.  How do we know that?  They are basically telling us to trust them and pay for these online "protection rackets."  Before I start paying for protection, would someone guarantee that the hackers don't know what a VPN is and that they will leave them alone?

It appears that our geopolitical adversaries are attacking America using these doggy doors.  Cities like Baltimore, Atlanta, New Orleans, and Pensacola have been attacked by hackers demanding ransoms.  I know some of you think Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran would never stoop to attacking through our doggy doors, but I am not so sure.

Another concern that I have is that our government is looking the other way.  It seems that allowing boys to compete against girls in sports is far more important than protecting our power grid and other utilities made vulnerable because of digital doggy doors.  I do not see the heads of cyber-hackers impaled on spikes on the bridges leading to Washington, D.C.  I do see our government going after Donald Trump because he dared to warn us about China.  It makes me scratch my head.

In God I trust.  In Google, FaceBook, Twitter, Amazon, TikTok, FBI, NSA and CIA, I do not trust.  I fear that the convenience offered to us by the tech giants is costing us way more than we think.

Watch out for those digital doggy doors.  They let bad guys come in to steal our privacy and our freedoms.  They make us reliant on untrustworthy cyber-companies who want to be our masters.  Does anyone else see this?

Image: Computer security by TheDigitalWay from Pixabay 

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