State-Backed Hacking Rising | Putin’s Internet | Bolstering Zomm Security, and more

Despite the extreme demands of the bill, even the typically wary opposition appeared willing to vote for it—as long as it had an expiration date. “All they were insisting was that this be ninety days, which is a long time to be governed by decree,” Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton, told me. But Orbán, who was adamant that the extension be indefinite, refused.

Test Kit Materials Bound for Washington State Seized by Feds (David Rasbach, Bellingham Gerald)
The federal government quietly seized orders for medical supplies made by hospitals April 7. Those seizures came despite President Trump directing states and hospitals to secure supplies to deal with the pandemic.

Lies about COVID-19 Might Be Deadly, but They’re Not Unique (Whitney Phillips, Wired)
When this is over, a return to “normal” for content moderation would be a huge mistake.
From the outset of the Wuhan outbreak in January, coronavirus conspiracy theories roared across social media. On the reactionary fringes, these centered on QAnon and the usual Deep State suspects, narratives that have been percolating in far-right corners for years. Within the more mainstream right—to the extent that such a thing exists in 2020—commentators may have sidestepped QAnon but they’ve still pinned the tail on the Deep State. For example, Sean Hannity said earlier this month that it “may be true” that a nefarious army of resistance bureaucrats were using the outbreak to “manipulate economies, suppress dissent, and push mandated medicines.” Many others, including Donald Trump, insisted that the response to Covid-19 was a feverish overreaction of the fake news media and their Democratic allies, who were desperate to tank the economy in order to hurt Trump’s reelection. It was just another impeachment hoax.
And so millions of people in the US downplayed the threat, blamed the Democrats, and derided scientific expertise. The specific circumstances of the Covid-19 outbreak may have been new, but the underlying arguments were not. Donald Trump won the 2016 election on a wave of screw-the-Left, drain-the-swamp, ignore-the-lamestream-media energies. Given that buildup of pollution, and all the time it had to filter through the far-right water table, it’s no surprise that the Covid-19 threat was met—at least in the critical first few months, when we could have started preparing en masse—with partisan jeers, attacks on the media, and efforts to own the libs through social un-distancing. It certainly wasn’t a surprise that someone like Anthony Fauci would be roped into his very own Deep State plot.
The population didn’t know what it needed to know, and it wasn’t doing what it needed to do.

Russian Trolls Hype Coronavirus and Giuliani Conspiracies (Adam Rawnsley, Daily Beast)
A Daily Beast investigation reveals dozens of Russian accounts pushing disinformation on everything from Joe Biden to the origin of the novel coronavirus.

The Trump Administration Escalates the War on White Supremacist Terrorism (Jack Crowe, National Review)
During a Wednesday phone interview with National Review, Nathan Sales, the State Department envoy on counterterrorism, described the move as a historic step in administration’s efforts to keep up with the dynamic nature of extremist violence in the 21st century.
“We think this sends a really strong message to the world, as well as to interested parties here in the United States, that we’re going to use our counterterrorism authorities to the fullest extent possible to confront terrorists of whatever ideological stripe,” Sales said.

State-Backed Hackers Using Virus to Increase Spying, U.K. and U.S. Warn (Helen Warrell and Katrina Manson, Financial Times)
Agencies report rise in cyberattacks on governments and health organizations.

Maryland Launches Page to Help Squash Coronavirus Rumors: “We Want to Separate Fact from Fiction” (Daniel Oyefusi, Baltimore Sun)
The page, created in partnership with the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, and the state departments of Health and of Information Technology, allows residents to read a variety of information about the coronavirus.