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Rogue Biohacking Is Not a Problem
Lasrick writes: Although biosecurity experts have long warned that biohackers will eventually engineer pathogens in the same way that computer enthusiasts in the 1970s developed viruses and adware, UC Berkeley's Zian Liu thinks fears about 'rogue biohackers' are overblown. He lists the five barriers that make it much more difficult to bioengineer in your garage than people think, but also suggests some important chokeholds regulators can take to prevent a would-be bioweaponeer from getting lucky.
The White Plague (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague) stays in the Sci Fi realm for now.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Biohacking is not a problem for now: there are large practical hurdles, as the article points out. People may argue (correctly) that these will eventually be overcome, so we don't know what may have to be done eventually. But the political question is whether anything needs to be done domestically right now, and the answer is no. That will likely remain the case for another decade or two.
The biggest bioweapons threat likely comes from well-financed terrorist organizations and religious cults. They do have the resources to get all the equipment, can mobilize dozens of trained professionals to work on a problem, and often operate in places where there is little government oversight to begin with. But that's already the CIA's responsibility, and it has a lot of leeway in dealing with such threats.
I can't say I recall that being a thing.
...to colonize Mars. We probably have another 50 years of relative safety. But it's clear that the human body is a nightmare from a information security point of view: it will accept almost any rogue DNA and happily incorporate it in it's own cells and replicate it, like an Win98 autoruns any USB drive inserted. The attackers of such a system have a definite advantage, defenders cannot close the autorun functionality without dramatically re-engineer the human being. So all it takes is one mad genius with the right tools to create an unstoppable, airborne, deadly virus.
Bioweapon creation is so deadly, that any attempt to create by a civilian it will most likely kill you before you succeed, unless you take expensive counter measures that will act as red flags, telling everyone what you are trying to do.
It does not prevent ISIL and similar groups from attempting it. They have sufficient money and size to hide their attempts, just like the USA and USSR did during the cold war.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Famous Last Words....
"Don't worry, it's unloaded..."
"Relax, we have the right-of-way..."
"It's okay, I'm sure this rope will hold our weight..."
"Don't worry, rogue biohacking is not a problem..."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Becoming a Biosecurity Expert sounds like a pretty good gig. I think I can con hospitals and corporations out of millions of dollars by developing systems to keep malicious people from hacking their genetic wares.
A nice thought but there are a number of flaws in this article.
For example, we had 28,000+ cases of Ebola in west Africa recently so for a moderate effort you could have a fairly lethal disease. If you could manage to mix that with an airborne virus, that's a pretty potent killer. Unless you got a quite expensive airtight system that probably means you're infected, but you'll be a slow suicide bomber. Just ride the subway, maybe take a flight or three through major hubs and for bonus points kill yourself instead of going to the hospital so they never find patient zero and the places you've been. Good luck putting New York in quarantine.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Glossed over in the story: "It's not that hard if you know what you're doing and have some money."
A few notes...
"It could cost $30,000 for a very basic setup." Never mind that someone with that level of skill could save that much in a couple of years. I know people who spent that much on sports equipment in a similar timeframe. Not all hackers are dirt-poor. Or they could get a middle-management job at a distributor and steal a few of the more expensive pieces. Some people have patience, you know.
"It's very hard to do the really subtle and clever things, like drug delivery bacteria." Conversely, it's nowhere near that hard to breed a better form of anthrax, not to mention a whole lot of other microbes. Anthrax is EASY to get - it's found on every continent, and there are regular outbreaks around the world. The same goes for many other nasty diseases.
"You need high-level biocontainment to be safe." But that's not hard to do for small samples, and relies on 1950s-era tech.
"You need very specific training to do it right." Well, thank heavens that we don't have hundreds of people with that sort of training. Oh, wait, we do. Well, at least 100% of them are sane. Er...
"You can't test on monkeys." But you can test on small, isolated communities of humans. By the time anyone notices it was man-made, it's too late. Nothing will happen if the bugs don't work, and if they DO work, it will take more than a while for the government to catch on.
The only issue is production-level amounts - making a few ounces for a major anthrax attack, for example. You don't have to make the cool spore/long-term dispersal agents for this purpose.
Generally, the big blind spot is "someone planning this will want to do it exactly like 1970s germ warfare types did, with tons of long-duration anthrax spores and well-tested lethal strains." Nope, not any more than mad bombers will all make highly-engineered explosives with anti-tamper devices and multiple remote detonators. They'll cut corners, take stupid risks, make a lot of mistakes, and a lot of them will die at home.
But it only takes one.
Unelected ignorant arrogant public servants in Australia are censoring bioresearch http://victimsofdsto.byethost3...
Censoring teaching encryption too https://www.iacr.org/S=Jl1
Censoring everything http://www.cla.asn.au/News/def... http://defencereport.com/austr... http://science.slashdot.org/st...
So the entire article boils down to "money is the only real barrier". The rest is just values of money that people are willing to accept to overlook the rules.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
in the same way that computer enthusiasts in the 1970s developed viruses and adware
I might grant you the first, but not the second, and it turns out that the real problems developed not from computer enthusiasts, but dedicated actors with a profit motive.
Which should frighten you even more when considering biologicals and companies like Monsanto and Eli Lilly.
I violated the rule and went ahead and read the article.
What he says is: Only rich assholes can do bioweapons.
Back when I was in high school -- early 1970s -- microbiology was one of my hobbies. Not that I was trying to grow anything nasty (in fact, the main reason I got into it at all was because my girl friend was interested in it.) But we did find a lot of low-cost ways to do things.
For example, TFA says "For instance, many sleep with test tubes under their armpits to avoid buying expensive incubators." That's fucking ridiculous. My incubator was a box lined with foam (like from a cheap cooler) and foil, warmed by a small incandescent bulb controlled by a dimmer switch. Didn't even bother with a thermostat, just adjusted the dimmer until it maintained the right temperature. These days I'd do it with a thermistor and an arduino to maintain temperature within 0.1 degrees.
A glove box is a pretty easy thing to build, easily done with stuff available at any hackerspace. (A plexiglass box with a reverse pressurization system, HEPA filters, and some short wavelength UV LEDs and/or high temp heater to sterilize the exhaust.) Wouldn't be as durable or safe as its commercial counterpart, but it wouldn't have to be.
TFA: "The third step would be to obtain the base bacteria or virus strains for modification or production. The most straightforward approach is to order and grow a known infectious strain, but this requires documentation. " So it's no longer the most straightforward. Any hobbyist microbiologist worth his or her salt knows how to isolate bacterial strains from random crap in the environment. (Hell, that's half the point of hobby, finding new and interesting strains.) It might take a little longer but it's totally undocumented. Similar techniques are used to selectively breed for antibiotic resistance, etc.
TFA: "A biohacker, working with limited resources and less-accurate equipment, would need years to re-engineer and weaponize a drug-delivery bacterium." Why the hell would a would-be bioterrorist bother engineering a drug-delivery bacterium? He doesn't care about side effects, and the "drug" is going to be whatever toxin the bacterium produces naturally. The author is arguing that a terrorist couldn't build a backpack nuke, but all the terrorist cares about is satisfied by a truck bomb full of ANFO.
All that said, a would-be bioterrorist is a lot more likely to kill himself before anyone else (just as many would-be bombers only managed to blow themselves up). Working with pathogens is a lot trickier than working with J. Random Bacillus. But if all you want to do is kill people, it doesn't take anywhere near the complexity of " engineering yeast to synthesize indigo, or programming genetic circuits to control whether bacteria sink or float." Bacteria have been randomly evolving the ability to kill people for as long as there have been people.
This is exactly the kind of threat analysis I would expect from someone who worked as an undergraduate researcher for 13 months in a biolab focused on renewable energy. Go ahead and parse that thought a bit.
How about this: Make sure that when we train someone with all the skills necessary to weaponize biology, we actually have something productive for them to do. It's much better to try to encourage positive behavior from our scientists through incentives (i.e. encourage good jobs, not just endless training grants) rather than plan on them becoming bitter, crazy terrorists.
I would think that if you have sufficiently crazy dedicated lab technicians, some of the lab work could be done by volunteers willing to sacrifice themselves for the cause. It's somewhat like it is for bomb-makers (although much more risky.)
Performing experiments on primates isn't a problem - especially if you don't care much for the scientific method and want results you can compare with controls. Keeping the experiments confined to the infidel sect is a problem though.
Creating a novel organism isn't necessary. Finding a more lethal variant of an existing organism is the goal. Influenza mutates constantly. It still requires a lot of luck, but not an impossible amount of luck.
A lot of early biological research was done with rather crude equipment.
I agree - biohackers aren't comparable with computer hackers. The cost of a mistake for a computer hacker is time and money. Biohackers are more similar to bomb makers - where the bomb makers have to depend on trial-and-error and don't have well developed procedures that can produce reproducible effects.
May be that it is ok as long as biohackers are trained as scientists; see at the bench and death ray.
PS I understand that you judge (scientific) biohackers by you, (engineering) computerhackers ;-)
... sometimes literally.
Like TFA says (with immense understatement), "bio-weapons hardly ever work the first time." More accurately, having a complex bio-weapon like ebolapox or birdthrax work the first time you tried it would be like writing a couple million lines of C code and have it compile cleanly and execute more or less correctly the first time without any testing.
Also, if you want to survive the global plague you would be unleashing you would have to develop and test a vaccine as well.
I suspect strongly that the testing process would be easily detectable and that could probably give one ample warning time that an outbreak is coming. If a mysterious disease wiped out an entire village in, say, Syria or Yemen I'd argue that would more likely be a bioweapon than a natural outbreak.