Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
...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
I can't say I recall [Adware in the 1970s] being a thing.
Are you kidding? I remember that I couldn't read a magazine in the 1970's without seeing a bunch of pop-ups. There was one that was a bank robber picking up a big bag of money, and one that was a car that flew across the page, and one that was, like, green Kryptonite radiation waves...
...Actually, never mind. On further reflection, I think that may have been a popup book about Superman.
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...
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.
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.
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.