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Advances in Bio-weaponry
kjh1 writes "Technology Review is running an eye-opening article on how biotechnology has advanced to the point where producing bio-weapons that were once only possible with the backing of governments with enormous resources is now possible with equipment purchased off eBay. You can now purchase a mini-lab of equipment for less than $10,000. The writer also interviewed a former Soviet bioweaponeer, Serguei Popov, who worked at the Biopreparat, the Soviet agency that secretly developed biological weapons. Popov has since moved to the US and provided a great deal of information on the types of weapons the Soviets were developing."
A WMD that's marketed specifically for evil geniuses that are on a tight budget. The days of cheap minion labour are behind us, guys, gotta look after the pennies.
I've got the spirit, lose the feeling.
And I don't even trust the people who have access to bio-warfare now.
A blog about stuff.
Heck for $2.50, I can go to Taco Bell and be a WMD the rest of the day.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I wouldn't worry about terrorist implications of this, it is actually very difficult for a group without large resources (and even for those with them) to create workable weapons of mass destruction and bioweaponry would deffinately fall into this catergory... From a journal article i read by J. Mueller in Terrorism and Political Violence (vol.17:487-505, 2005)
Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult that had some three hundred scientists in its employ and an estimated budget of $1 billion, reportedly tried at least nine times over five years to set off biological weapons by spraying pathogens from trucks and wafting them from rooftops, hoping fancifully to ignite an apocalyptic war. These efforts failed to create a single fatality--in fact, nobody even noticed that the attacks had taken place.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
He was deputy chief of science opperations at one of the USSR's main bioweapons facilities, and has detailed much of this experience in "Biohazard".
Frankly, this is the stuff of horror stories.
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
And that's why I don't go anywhere without my mutated anthrax
...for Duck hunting!
Demented But Determined.
Nothing to see here. Good article, but the point made is fairly worthless. Technology is getting better and cheaper. Why is it suprising that it should extend to the field of biotech? If the dude next door wants to whack you, I don't think that he needs to produce a virus to do it. I'm pretty sure that guns are still more economical and efficient for personal enterprise of this sort.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
GF: Why are they writing about the Soviets in the past tense? ...then I'm leaving you. ...
Me: Er, because they're in the past?
GF: Huh?
Me: Um, the Soviet Union collapsed more than a decade ago. Didn't you know that?
GF: Get out of here! I thought China was still around.
Me: Honey, the Soviet Union is modern day Russia. Not China.
GF: What? I thought Soviets were commies, and the Chinese are commies.
Me: Yes, but the Soviets were Russians.
GF: The Russians are Chinese?
Me: No! NO! NOO!
GF: Jesus. You don't have to yell! I was just asking!
Me: Alright, alright, I'm sorry.
GF: So how do the Nazis fit into all this?
Me: NAZIS!? Are you pulling my leg?
GF: I'm not!
Me:
GF:
You can't make this shit up I tell you.
From wikipedia:
Sucessful dispersal of chemical and biological agents is tough. Government funded programs have not been very effective, what makes anyone think that terrorists could come up with an effective delivery system.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Your post caught my eye because it was really funny. Then I started to wonder what else you talk about in your posts.
Looking at your recent posting history I have found the following.
Negroponte says Linux too 'Fat'
Startup Webaroo to put the 'Web on a Hard Drive'?
Er, I'm asking this in order to, er, protect my girlfriend's sensibilities. Can't have her unwittingly downloading such naughty stuff you know. =)
Two Unofficial IE Patches Block Attacks
So many references to your "girlfriend" in so short a time aroused my suspicions so I decided to google for '"Dante Shamest" girlfriend' and guess what I found.
THIS proof that you are a liar with no girlfriend.
But...I don't.
You've been using the same bullshit ruse for over a year now. It's ok if you're celibate, but it's just plain pathetic to lie about having a girlfriend.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Does this mean that America is going to invade E-bay?
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
So here is the rub. One not only has to have the equipment and expertise to create the biowepon. One also needs a way to infect people in lethal doses. And, to begin with, one needs to believe the bioagent will be more effecient than conventional weapons. Look at it this way. The allies probably did more damage in Dresden using conventional weapons that in Japan using nukes. However, the Japan attack was much more effecient, posed almost no risk to the Allies, had no real defense, and was not limited by the logistics of flying many planes. For a bioagent to be preferable, it must be like a nuke. If Bush is to believed the Iraqis have a bunch of biological agents, yet we see bombs are used more. Perhpas the Iragis to have WMDs, and bombs are just so much more effecient and dramatic. I mean proving to the US forces that defending against IEDs is hopeless to so mouch more dramatic than simply killing everyone in the green zone with lead poisoning, for instance.
This seems like another fear mongering article planted to create an impression that certain not-so-dangerous things are critical, so that the complex really dangerous things can be ignored. It just shows a true lack of imagination. I tink in most cases the villians just want the drama. That is why they blow up the building after it is evacated, instead of blowing up the location to which the people are evacuated to.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Making HEU is a very difficult task; Zippe-type centrifuges can't be put together in your back shed. More plausibly, they could steal it or buy it on the black market, but even that's going to be very difficult.
WMD's are a bogus category, in my opinion, draw a bogus analogy between nukes, which genuinely can kill tens of thousands of people at a shot without any great operational genius, and chemical and biological weapons, which seem to be very hard to make that lethal, even though theoretically they can be.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Seriously, I'd expect someone with your claimed credentials to understand the basics of this. This isn't cut-and-paste.
You have to identify the exact DNA/RNA sequence that identifies your target.
Then you have to engineer the virus to only kill the hosts with that sequence
while remaining dormant in the hosts without that sequence.
And you can't just cut-and-paste the sequence you want to attack into the virus. The changes to the virus would be a completely different research project.And why would that person choose bio-tech over the conventional shotgun?Because chemical agents work so much more effectively, are easier to manufacture, transport and disperse.
And even more effective than chemical agents are conventional weapons. Such as "hand guns" or "shotguns". Not to mention the ever popular "explosives strapped to your body".
A soviet bioweaponeer? NOW I get why the lower-shelf vodka of same name is so toxic.
In the classic days of Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance Man was the master of everything and was on top of many topics of interest. However, many modern achievements have been realized through specialists - science, engineering, agriculture, arts, etc... It would not be fair for a world-class scientist to be responsible for establishing the policy guidelines of a new technology. Their main concern is and should be to advance the frontiers of science - their opinions should carry weight regarding policy, but in general they are not adept with such responsibilities.
In the absence of an appropriate entity with this responsibility, the lack of oversight may lead to unwanted outcomes. Einstein's revelations made the atomic bomb feasible, yet afterwards Einstein was one of the biggest opponents of nuclear arms. As someone who is in biotechnology, I know that we may have social responsibility on the back of our minds, but in the forefront is finding that discovery before someone else in our field finds it first!
Bill Joy's well-known article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" predicted this like 6 years ago:
. html
http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy
The big quesiton is: why aren't the intelligent, well-educated, technically minded of the world actually taking issues like this seriously, and doing something about it? Probably because thinking about this stuff means questioning one's own vocation and existence, and perhaps discovering that the blind pursuit of scientific knowledge or development of technology can have just as many unintended bad consequences as good ones. We can't stop these pursuits; nor should we. But all who are involved in these pursuits must also assume responsibility for analyzing the risks of their application.
Bill Joy called for a "Hippocratic Oath" of sorts for scientists and technologists to take responsibility for the ethical concerns as well as the scientific or technological or design concerns. We already know how to assess some forms of risk. These are just different kinds of risks to be assessed, and they are real.
If we are as good and as smart as we think we are, how can we not step up?
* The major failure with the attack was the lack of time to develop a good dispersal mechanism, as the attack plan was moved ahead of schedule because of the cult's impression that the authorities were going to act on them imminently. They had this impression on the basis of penetration of Japanese military and police sources. They eventually settled on liquid in bags getting poked with umbrella tips.
* The "specific targets" at Matsumoto were judicial magistrates whom the cult thought had a hand in the investigation against them. Seven died in that attack, incidentally.
* Aum was fricking scary with the amount of resources they had at their disposal. I remember a $300 million chemical weapons factory (operating completely above-board in Japan in broad daylight, just another chemical factory, had all its permits), and them staging a parachute raid on a JSDF facility using turncoat JSDF forces. Sounds like a bad anime, I know.
I wouldn't be sanguine about this. If you can get weapons grade sarin you can certainly develop a delivery system for it. Its not trivial but, hey, $300 million dollars has a certain way of making non-trivial problems seem a whole lot less daunting. We lucked out in a major way, in that with everything designed right for the attack (high-profile target with hundreds of thousands of people in an enclosed space) the cult made multiple errors (impure toxin, dispersal surface area the size of an umbrella puncture, etc) which minimized the casualties. There were other lucky incidents, too -- two Japanese station attendants soaked up the chemical in one car with newspapers, sealed it in plastic, and took it to the station room (I don't know if they had any idea that they were dealing with anything worse than a liquid mess, but both of them died for their troubles, which many people from exposure to that portion of the attack).
And, incidentally, remember the anthrax attack on the US and how the postal system and much of the East Coast essentially *shut down* with less casualties? Its difficult to overstate how much of the Japanese economy/government/everything is dependent on Tokyo and how dependent Tokyo is on their mass transit system. If you hit one car in Tokyo's inner loop with a lethal nerve agent tomorrow and then followed it up with a successful strike once a week for, oh, I don't know, two weeks? Three? That would be about as effective at causing economic damage in Japan as driving an airplane into a tall building of your choice in New York City.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.