Glenn Reynolds looks at the danger of bio-terror and finds it more than troubling.
An excerpt:
Scary and deadly is bad enough, but the "freaky and science-fictional" threat is worse, if perhaps more subtle: Pathogens tailored for particular ethnic groups. Diseases that only attack children. Psychotropic pathogens that affect people's minds — grossly, via schizophrenia or tranquilization, or subtly, by imbuing love for Big Brother. As Pontin notes, this kind of thing isn't currently within the capabilities of terrorists or small groups, but it's something we can expect from nation-states. We've never seen a technological revolution that somebody didn't try to weaponize, and here, "the revolution in biological science will provide enormous temptations to nation-states. And the stuff that nation-states will be able to do is really scary. It provides enormous possibilities for coercion and oppression, quite possibly for the most positive-seeming reasons."
Read it all here.
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