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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.
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
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...
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.