by Marc Goodman
Today you don’t even need to be a synthetic biologist to get access to the tools of genetic sequencing. Companies such as EasyDNA will gladly take any objects you send them in the mail such as chewing gum, cigarette butts, dental floss, razor clippings, toothpicks, licked stamps, and used tissues and will sequence and test them for paternity, ancestry, child gender, and other legal and medical reasons. They’re called “discreet DNA samples,” and they can be processed for around $100 each. Not sure if you want to hire that new guy who came into your office for the interview? Just send off the coffee cup he left behind to the lab to see if he might be a risk for a bunch of expensive diseases that could cost your company a bundle. Hate your ex-boyfriend? Why not post his genetic sequence online and prove to the world that his DNA showed an elevated risk for mental illness or alcoholism? Believe it or not, taking a stranger’s DNA and sending it off to the lab is completely legal, and there is nothing to prohibit it except for the very narrow exception of violations of GINA. Advances in synthetic biology won’t just raise a host of ethical and privacy problems; they will create criminal ones as well—opportunities Crime, Inc. is eager to exploit to its advantage.
Bio-cartels and New Opiates for the Masses
Organized crime has always made money from drugs—lots of it. At the height of his reign, Colombia’s Pablo Escobar reportedly was bringing $60 million every single day into his “company” coffers. More recently, Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera was estimated to be worth billions, earning him a place on the Forbes wealthiest list. Their business expertise lay mostly in agriculture and logistics: growing plants, distilling their products into substances that made people high, and distributing them around the world. The cartels have always been quick to adopt technology into their operations—for communications, supply chain management, counterintelligence, and crop sciences. Though narcos have been using genetic engineering since the days of Miami Vice, synthetic biology holds the potential to completely disrupt the way they do business, offering potentially vastly higher profits and profoundly simplified distribution networks, with fewer risks. Not only can synbio be used to make glowing plants and fight individual cancer cells, but it creates strong economic incentives and opportunities for Crime, Inc. to engineer new metabolic pathways for both illicit narcotics and counterfeit pharmaceuticals.
Synbio makes it possible to move away from a plant-based narcotics world to a synthetic one. Why do you need the plants anymore? You could just take the genetic codes for the active ingredients in marijuana, poppies, and coca leaves and cut and paste them into yeast. The yeast in turn can be directed to grow the pot, morphine, coke, and heroin for you—yeast that can be baked into bread or brewed in beer, meaning we’re going to have some really interesting bread and beer in the future. Doing so has radically disruptive advantages for the existing cartels. No need for thousands of hectares for poppy and coca fields easily detected by surveillance aircraft anymore. No need to smuggle multi-ton runs of highly detectable heroin or coke across the borders. Nothing to fear from drug-sniffing dogs either. At a few billion yeast cells per milliliter, a small vial could be replicated time and time again under controlled conditions and should stock Crime, Inc. well into the next century.
Those who find such a future implausible need only look at the strides already made with synthetic biology and engineered drugs. E. coli bacteria have been genetically engineered and reprogrammed to produce THC (the active ingredient in cannabis), and others have been able to coax baker’s yeast into making LSD and opium. Rapidly advancing changes in digital biology may also disintermediate existing incumbents in the narcotics trade. Just as Microsoft took the personal PC away from IBM, and Apple took the mobile phone from Nokia and BlackBerry, it may be a student at MIT who obviates the need for a Colombia-based Pablo Escobar of tomorrow. Moreover, if Craig Venter is right and we will all have bio-printers at home, why not just print my own THC or oxycodone—evaporating billions in profits from legacy players and creating new leaders in the bio-cartels of tomorrow.
Hacking the Software of Life: Bio-crime and Bioterrorism
In the nearer term, I think various developments in synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens, and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain—you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet.
NICK BOSTROM
Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, groups such as Silicon Valley’s legendary Homebrew Computer Club gathered to talk tech and “hack for good.” Today there is a vibrant DIY-bio movement based very much on the same mind-set, with local community labs such as Genspace in New York and BioCurious in California providing spaces and tools for citizen scientists to come together to work and learn from each other. These are bio-hackers—in the original sense of the word—hacking for good. Though DNA is the world’s original operating system, to hackers it’s just another operating system waiting to be cracked.
Even absent ill intent, accidents involving lab-grown pathogens can prove deadly. In 1977, swine flu, a pathogen that had been dead for twenty years, suddenly reemerged. Later it was discovered it reentered the populace after a lowly lab worker mishandled a sample that had been frozen since the 1950s. More recently, a number of bio-mishaps have occurred with potentially lethal consequences. In March 2013, officials at a maximum-security government research lab in Texas said they had lost a vial containing Guanarito virus, a pathogen causing “bleeding under the skin, in internal organs or from body orifices like the mouth, eyes, or ears,” and the FBI is investigating the matter. Just one year later at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, two thousand vials containing the SARS virus went missing—biotoxins that if they fell into the hands of rogue governments or terrorists could be used as biological weapons.
We’ve already seen cases of “bad bio” in the past, particularly around bioterrorism plots, releasing harmful biological agents to the public. The best-known example of this was the mailing of anthrax spores to members of the media and two U.S. senators back in 2001, resulting in the deaths of five people who had contact with the deadly envelopes. Overseas, we know that al-Qaeda has attempted to build bioweapons and its affiliates in Yemen have been working to create large quantities of ricin—a white powdery toxin so deadly a mere speck of it kills instantly. Many other terrorist organizations are known to have created bioweapons as well, notably Aum Shinrikyo, the group responsible for the 1995 sarin chemical gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed thirteen people and injured nearly a thousand more. What most people do not know about that infamous subway attack was that Aum had originally planned a massive bio-attack against Tokyo and spent nearly $10 million on a decade of research and development trying to create a suitably powerful biotoxin. Given the limited advances in biotechnology in the 1980s and early 1990s, it abandoned its quest for a bioweapon in favor of a chemical one. Today such an attack would prove significantly easier to carry out.
The terrorists of today and tomorrow may no longer have to worry about struggling to obtain access to controlled pathogens and biological agents from government labs. With the advent of synbio, they can just download the genetic sequence blueprints and print these deadly viruses themselves. The full-length genetic codes of some of the world’s deadliest pathogens including Ebola and Spanish flu are freely available for download in the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s DNA sequence database. To prove the point, in 2002 Eckard Wimmer, a university virologist, was able to chemically synthesize the polio genome using mail-order DNA. Back then it cost $300,000; today it would be closer to $1,000 and in the future less than the cost of a latte. Though governments around the world have spent billions trying to eradicate polio, tomorrow a terrorist, rogue government, or lone wolf could reintroduce it for a few dollars. Genetic engineering that used to be extremely difficult and expensive can now be done anywhere in the world with several weeks of training, a laptop, and a cre
dit card.
Of course would-be bio-criminals needn’t rely on known or existing pathogens; using synbio, they could actually create their own even more deadly viruses. We recently saw an example of what this might look like when researchers in the Netherlands and the United States altered the genetic code of avian influenza (H5N1 bird flu) to make it more deadly. Though bird flu has a 70 percent mortality rate, the disease is hard for humans to get. Yet by making a mere four genetic mutations, the Dutch-American team was able to engineer a much more virulent strain capable of going airborne, vastly increasing its transmissibility to human beings and effectively weaponizing it. The original goal of the research was to study how quickly H5N1 might evolve in order to better prevent its spread, but the genetically altered strain, if released, could readily lead to a global pandemic. In the name of science, the researchers wanted to publish their findings, including the genetic code of the more virulent strain they had created, in the journals Science and Nature, but many contended doing so would be akin to providing a recipe book to terrorists to build bioweapons. In the end, for the first time ever, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity stepped in and asked the journals to limit the details published, to which they temporarily agreed. This particular risk was momentarily avoided, but the code will eventually leak, and others will surely be created.
While a broad-based bioterror attack would be devastating, synbio makes it possible to target not only a whole population but possibly a single individual among millions. Personalized medicine has demonstrated it is possible to target a single cancer cell while leaving all surrounding cells intact, but the flip side is personalized bioweapons. In the future, would-be bio-assassins need only recover some genetic material left behind on a fork or spoon at a restaurant, perhaps from a high-profile politician or celebrity, to create a bespoke weaponized virus. Though one might think such scenarios are relegated solely to the realm of science fiction, news broke as part of the WikiLeaks scandal that the U.S. government had allegedly sent diplomatic cables to its embassies overseas instructing personnel to attempt to collect the DNA of world leaders—presumably not to enroll them in Obamacare.
While most bio-hackers today are hacking for good, among the masses will undoubtedly be a number of bad apples and even criminal elements. Over time, there will be biological equivalents for all major categories of computer crime today. For example, hacking your genetic information may well be the identity theft of tomorrow—especially as DNA becomes widely used for authentication. Indeed, the ultimate form of identity theft is human cloning, and the number of technical barriers to making it a reality are falling quickly, an eventuality for which police and society are entirely unprepared. As such, we have no alternative other than to seriously consider the steps we need to take now to protect the world’s original operating system.
The Final Frontier: Space, Nano, and Quantum
The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.
JOHN F. KENNEDY
Though the space shuttle program has ended, much research and activity in the field of space science continues, particularly with private companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic commercializing space transportation. Another space company, Planetary Resources, founded in 2012 by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, intends to bring the natural resources of space to within humanity’s reach by landing robots on asteroids and mining them for raw materials, using ultralow-cost 3-D printed spacecraft. Though it may be difficult to fathom, criminals and terrorists alike will attempt to harness space technologies to their advantage. Just as nobody foresaw a terrorist hijacking or the need for air marshals when the Wright brothers first launched their plane at Kitty Hawk, so too does it seem nigh impossible to ponder the need for space marshals. Undoubtedly and regrettably, that day will come as well.
For now, most of Crime, Inc.’s interest in space has been focused on satellite technologies, and the same is true for terrorist organizations. As noted previously, Lashkar-e-Taiba employed satellite technologies for imagery and communications during its brutal attack on the people of Mumbai, and Shia insurgents in Iraq have manipulated cheap Russian software intended to steal satellite TV signals into hacking the UAV video feeds bouncing off classified American satellites. Along the same lines, hackers in Brazil have used high-performance antennas and home-brew gear to turn U.S. Navy satellites into their own personal CB communicators. The satellites, which pirates call bolinhas, or “little balls,” have been used by everyone from truckers driving in the Amazon unable to get cell-phone signals to organized crime groups sending coded messages to alert fellow crooks and drug dealers in remote parts of the country about impending police raids.
Perhaps an even greater risk to our global satellite system would be for malicious actors to attempt to destroy these man-made orbital machines by altering their flight paths and crashing them into each other or into an ever-growing amount of space debris. Satellites very much form a key component of our global critical information infrastructure and are required for vital services such as weather forecasting, emergency communications, military warning systems, flight safety, and GPS navigation. Destroying an orbiting satellite is not without precedent. In 2007, for example, China successfully tested an antisatellite weapon, obliterating one of its own aging weather satellites—unnerving the U.S. and other governments.
The same effect might just as easily be accomplished by injecting malicious software into the satellite or its controlling ground station or even by launching a denial-of-service attack against a satellite. Such an attack would be entirely possible according to a bulletin by the security firm IOActive and the government’s own Computer Emergency Response Team. In fact, according to a congressional commission, in 2007 the Chinese military interfered with two U.S. government satellites by hacking a ground station responsible for their control in Norway. More recently, in 2014, it was revealed that a hacker group based within the People’s Liberation Army offices was responsible for an in-depth series of attacks against both U.S. and European satellite companies.
It’s not just satellites that are being hacked, so too are actual spacecraft. According to a report from 2008, a Russian cosmonaut brought an infected laptop to the International Space Station, a computer that spread the W32.Gammima.AG virus to ISS operational computer systems as well as several Windows XP laptops on board. In another incident of malware in space, a different cosmonaut accidentally infected the ISS, this time with the Stuxnet virus, when he plugged a USB stick into the space station’s computer network. Uploading a virus into the space station as it flies 220 miles above our planet seems a bit akin to the scene from Independence Day where Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum transfer a virus into the aliens’ space network to save earth, but when asked about computer malware infecting the ISS spacecraft, a NASA spokesman replied, “It’s not a frequent occurrence, but this is not the first time either.”
Soon criminals, terrorists, hacktivists, and rogue governments will no longer need to commandeer the satellites of others; they will be able to just launch their own. New technologies, such as miniature CubeSats, are about the size of a shoe box and don’t cost billions or millions of dollars but rather can be built and launched for under $100,000. These devices could be operated “off grid,” meaning that they could be launched and controlled outside the purview of government, opening up channels for private encrypted satellite communications. Already the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin has announced its plan to take the Internet “beyond the reach of censors by putting their own communication satellites into orbit.” While it is clear that the future of space exploration holds great potential for humanity as well as some risks, back down on earth there are other emerging technologies that demand a closer review.
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter on an atomic and molecular scale all the way down to the nanometer. To understand just how small a nano
meter is, consider that a human hair is eight thousand nanometers in diameter. There is a revolution afoot as scientists try to create molecularlevel machines that can do everything from repair our bodies to build ultrafast computers. In 1991, the early phases of this nanotech revolution provided a new form of carbon with a cylindrical nano-structure known as the nanotube. Carbon nanotubes have unique material and electrical properties making them extraordinarily potent tools in the miniaturization of electronics. Graphene is another powerful nano-material discovered in 2004; it promises to be every bit as disruptive as plastics were. The “wonder material” is a hundred times stronger than steel, weighs one-sixth as much, and conducts electricity better than copper. Bridges and airplanes might be made from the material one day, and it will likely have a profound impact on the world of electronics. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, nanotechnology “will leave virtually no aspect of life untouched and is expected to be in widespread use by 2020.”
Perhaps nanotech’s greatest contributions may come in the field of medicine, where a therapeutic nano-bot, a thousand times smaller than a cancer cell, could enter the bloodstream with nanoscale gold particles enlaced with anticancer drugs, bringing them directly to the precise location of a tumor. Moreover, nanotechnology, like synthetic biology, can be a form of programmable matter—matter that can change its physical properties such as shape, density, and conductivity based on user input or autonomous sensing. These programmable materials can also self-assemble like strands of DNA, taking a bottom-up approach whereby molecules adopt a defined arrangement—an achievement commonly employed by nature but heretofore beyond the common reach of human engineering.