Day 22

Using Gene-splicing equipment available online and other common laboratory equipment and materials, a disgruntled molecular biology graduate student undertakes a secret project to recreate the smallpox virus. Not content merely to bring back an extinct virus to which the general population has no immunity, he uses public-source material to enhance the virus’s lethality. His activities raise no eyebrows at his university lab, where synthesizing and modifying complex genomes is commonplace. Although time-consuming, the task is not especially difficult. He buys short pieces of the genome and strings them together—taking care not to order sequences long enough to alert the gene-synthesis companies from which he purchases, all of which screen orders for dangerous gene combinations. He synthesizes most of the virus himself to avoid detection. When he finishes, he infects himself and, just as symptoms begin to emerge, goes to an airport and has close contact with as many people as he can in a short time. He then kills himself before becoming ill and is buried by his grieving family; neither they nor the authorities have any idea of his infection.

The outbreak begins just shy of two weeks later and seems to come from everywhere at once. Because of the virus’s long incubation period, it has spread far by the time the disease first manifests itself. Initial efforts to immunize swaths of the population prove of limited effectiveness because of the perpetrator’s manipulations of the viral genome. Efforts to identify the perpetrator, once it becomes clear that the outbreak is not an accident, require many months of forensic work. In the meantime, authorities have no idea whether the country—and quickly the world—has just suffered an attack by a rogue state, a terrorist group, or a lone individual. Dozens of groups around the world claim responsibility for the attack, several of them plausibly.
Fantastic as this scenario sounds, there is nothing especially improbable or futuristic about it. The materials required to pull it off are already inexpensive, and the price of DNA synthesis continues to fall rapidly. People have already constructed viruses with long genetic sequences and have also modified existing organisms to enhance their propensity to kill. Although making these sequences behave like viruses still poses technical challenges, those challenges are fading quickly. As the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity bluntly put it in 2006, it is “possible to construct infectious agents from synthetic or naturally derived DNA. The technology for synthesizing DNA is readily accessible, straightforward and a fundamental tool used in current biological research. In contrast, the science of constructing and expressing viruses in the laboratory is more complex and somewhat of an art.”1 The number of people who could pull off this nightmare scenario today is not huge, but it is growing fast. Today’s art will quickly become, like DNA synthesis itself, routine science, then just routine. Meanwhile, the number of people capable of less sophisticated biosecurity mischiefs, including some that could have devastating effects on significant quantities of people, is already large and far-flung geographically.

What is more, biotechnology is only one arena in which ever smaller groupings of people can leverage technology to attack ever larger entities—up to and including corporations, states, and societies at large. Cyberspace is another arena. The number of people capable of mounting a meaningful cyberattack has grown alongside the proliferation of globally networked computer systems. The opportunities for such attacks are themselves proliferating, becoming cheaper, and involving an increasingly diverse array of technologies.

~~The Future of Violence: Robots and Germs, Hackers and Drones    -by- Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum