Filed under: Genetic Testing, Pandemic, Pharyngula, Predictions, PZ Myers, Science, Science Fiction, tech, Violence
Last week I mentioned the genetic breakthrough accomplished by J Craig Venter and his team: the creation of functional man-made DNA. Since then, lots of very smart people have been trying to sort through the implications of this development. One of the better collections of such discussion I have seen can be found at Edge.
Here’s a bit from PZ Myers (also on his blog) that I find particularly insightful:
Nature’s constant attempts to kill us are often neglected in these kinds of discussions as a kind of omnipresent background noise. Technology sometimes seems more dangerous because it moves fast and creates novelty at an amazing pace, but again, Venter’s technology isn’t the big worry. It’s much easier and much cheaper to take an existing, ecologically successful bug and splice in a few new genes than to create a whole new creature from scratch…and unlike the de novo synthesis of life, that’s a technology that’s almost within the reach of garage-bound bio-hackers, and is definitely within the capacity of many foreign and domestic institutions. Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.
Let me repeat that last sentence: Frankenstein bacteria are harmless compared to the possibilities of hijacking E. coli or a flu virus to nefarious ends.
It’s almost like he’s read Communion of Dreams, eh?
Jim Downey
Filed under: Bruce Schneier, Expert systems, movies, NYT, Science Fiction, Society, tech, Terrorism, Travel, Violence
In listening/reading about the Toyota car crashes earlier this year, a thought had occurred to me: if it was a software problem with controlling the brakes or throttle, could that be something which could be used maliciously against the owner of a car? I mean, I could see where it would make an interesting plot point in a mystery – someone gets into the car’s computer system, mucks around, and then a couple of days later the car crashes, killing the driver. But since I don’t write mysteries (though there are elements of that in Communion of Dreams), I let the idea just slip away.
Now it seems that I wasn’t thinking on nearly a large enough scale:
Cars’ Computer Systems Called at Risk to Hackers
Automobiles, which will be increasingly connected to the Internet in the near future, could be vulnerable to hackers just as computers are now, two teams of computer scientists are warning in a paper to be presented next week.
The scientists say that they were able to remotely control braking and other functions, and that the car industry was running the risk of repeating the security mistakes of the PC industry.
“We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input — including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,” they wrote in the report, “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile.”
Well, it’s too late to enter this year’s Fifth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest by Bruce Schneier, but that’d be a great one: terrorists design a computer worm which targets the control systems of cars, and when the worm is activated on a certain date, all the cars will suddenly go out of control on America’s roads, killing thousands and spreading mass panic. Given the level of dependence we have on cars & trucks in the US, this would quickly cripple the economy and destroy the country.
Make a hell of a book or movie, wouldn’t it? It could even be done as a 24 style TV show, where the protagonist has to track down and stop the mad computer genius behind the plot.
Gah. Now I suppose Homeland Security will be paying me a visit for coming up with such an idea . . .
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Constitution, Failure, Government, Guns, Politics, Predictions, Press, Society, Violence
I was gone over the weekend, and didn’t get back home until last evening. Since returning, I’ve been playing a little catch-up to our drug raid debacle, which has continued to get attention nationwide. So, some quick follow-up . . .
First, the issue hasn’t died down at all. The YouTube vid in question has now been seen by almost a million people, and the issue has now shifted from being one about pot laws to being more one about civil liberties in general and the use of paramilitary force by police in specific. It’s not often that I am in agreement with political commentary on FOX News, but this whole interview from yesterday is almost something that I could have written.
The initial response from the mayor and police chief last Thursday was seen as entirely inadequate, and yesterday afternoon the Chief held another press conference to announce a number of changes. The Missourian has the best coverage of this news conference so far. Here’s a bit from that article:
The changes include:
- A captain in charge of the area where the raid is to take place has to approve the operation.
- The location has to be under constant surveillance once the warrant has been issued.
- A raid is not to take place when children are present except “under the most extreme circumstances,” Burton said.
“We will always police with common sense,” he said.
This *is* a step in the right direction, but it hardly goes far enough, and it remains to be seen whether it does much to quiet the tumult here locally or even nationally. Why do I say this? Because they have not yet addressed the basic issue of when it is appropriate to use paramilitary levels of force. There is a growing awareness that this policy question has to be resolved: why is SWAT being used when there is not an imminent threat to the public safety? The local discussion boards have gone nuts (full link round-up of the Tribune’s coverage and discussion here) and appropriately so. Tomorrow night there will be a meeting of the new Civilian Review Board and next Monday during the regularly-scheduled City Council meeting there will undoubtedly be discussion of the matter. Supposedly, the internal review of the raid is to be completed and released later this week, and I bet that will just fuel the debate further. People are really pissed off.
This is not over. Whether it will lead to any changes here locally or perhaps even nationally remains to be seen.
Jim Downey
Filed under: ACLU, Civil Rights, Constitution, Failure, Government, Guns, Politics, Predictions, Press, Reason, Society, Violence, YouTube
Yesterday I wrote about the latest local battle in the War on (Some) Drugs, which led to the shooting of two dogs, the terrorizing of a family, and the diminution of our civil rights as police departments adopt increasingly militarized tactics. But not like I was alone in this, since the story has been picked up and published in countless posts online as well as getting attention from the mainstream media. Facebook posts, hits to the YouTube vid now over 200,000 (it was 2,000 when I posted the vid yesterday), et cetera.
So, the heat is starting to build. Of course, this can’t be ignored by the local police department, so they chatted with the Tribune to give their side (a bit). And what did they say?
“It was unfortunate timing,” said Lt. Scott Young, SWAT commander. “We were in the process of considering a lot of changes. We were already having meetings to improve narcotic investigations, then this happened.”
Columbia police spokeswoman Jessie Haden said there sometimes was a lag between the time a warrant was issued and when SWAT could execute the warrant. The problem was SWAT members’ primary assignments, such as their role as beat officers or investigators, would take precedence over SWAT and they would have to work overtime to participate in SWAT operations.
Well, OK then. It was just a case of unfortunate timing. The warrant was going to run out, you see, so they *had* to act in the middle of the night when the SWAT team was available.
Er, what?
SWAT teams were developed to cope with particularly dangerous situations – something which presents a major threat to the safety of the public. They train to deploy quickly, to secure a dangerous environment while dealing with someone who is heavily armed. Almost by definition, anything which presents a major threat to the public safety and security requires a very fast response – you don’t want to leave a hostage situation hanging until you can make sure no one is going to be getting in too much overtime. And likewise, if narcotics distribution is going on, if a major drug deal is happening, you don’t want to wait more than a week to schedule your SWAT team.
In other words, if it ain’t an emergency, SWAT shouldn’t be used.
Think about that. If the situation requires the use of such militarized tactics and equipment, then how the hell can you just let it wait until you can make sure that everyone on the team has completed their other routine job requirements?
Yet that is what they did. Again, from the Tribune:
The warrant authorizing SWAT and investigators to enter Whitworth’s home was approved by Boone County Associate Circuit Judge Leslie Schneider on Feb 3., and the raid happened Feb. 11.
8 days. They waited 8 days to act. How the hell does that qualify as the sort of emergency situation for which SWAT is required?
It doesn’t.
Here’s the video, again:
Yet they had been sitting on that warrant for 8 days. 8 days during which they hadn’t even determined that there would be a child inside the home.
Welcome to your police state. When the SWAT team can be used for any police action, so long as there’s a justification of War on (Some) Drugs involved. And time to make sure the bust doesn’t mess up any of the officer’s schedules.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Emergency, Predictions, Preparedness, Society, Terrorism, Violence
…for ages that if someone *really* wanted to hurt our country, they could do so with a bunch of small-scale bombs at tourist sites and malls around the country. The bombs wouldn’t have to be big, or kill a lot of people – just scare people enough that they stop going to those places unless they really needed to. The economy would collapse in a matter of weeks, given that about 70% of our GDP is generated by consumer sales.
So let’s hope that this isn’t the first such instance:
Car bomb scares Times Square but fails to explode
NEW YORK – Police found an “amateurish” but potentially powerful bomb that apparently began to detonate but did not explode in a smoking sport utility vehicle in Times Square, authorities said Sunday.Thousands of tourists were cleared from the streets for 10 hours after two vendors alerted police to the suspicious vehicle, which contained three propane tanks, fireworks, two filled 5-gallon gasoline containers, and two clocks with batteries, electrical wire and other components, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.
So far, reaction to this event seems to be calmer than I would expect. But we’ll see what happens when it’s no longer the weekend and people start using it to try and score political points on one side or the other. Remember, fear sells.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Civil Rights, Emergency, Government, Religion, Society, Terrorism, Violence
. . . what sort of panic and chaos we’d have if there were religious nuts who killed a bunch of people because they were fighting a war of liberation:
Double suicide bombings kill 38 on Moscow subway
MOSCOW – Female suicide bombers blew themselves up Monday in twin attacks on Moscow subway stations packed with rush-hour passengers, killing at least 38 people and wounding more than 60, officials said. The carnage blamed on rebels from the Caucasus region follows the killings of several high-profile Islamic militant leaders there.
The blasts come six years after Islamic separatists from the southern Russian region carried out a pair of deadly Moscow subway strikes and raise concerns that the war has once again come to the capital, amid militants’ warnings of a renewed determination to push their fight.
Gee, I’m glad there’s nothing like that brewing here:
Militia members charged with police-killing plot
WASHINGTON – Nine suspects tied to a Christian militia in the Midwest are charged with conspiring to kill police officers, then attack a funeral in the hopes of killing more law enforcement personnel, federal prosecutors said Monday.
* * *
Once other officers gathered for a slain officer’s funeral, the group planned to detonate homemade bombs at the funeral, killing more, according to newly unsealed court papers.
According to the indictment, the idea of attacking a police funeral was one of numerous scenarios discussed as ways to go after law enforcement officers. Other scenarios included a fake 911 call to lure an officer to his or her death, or an attack on the family of a police officer.
Now, think again what would happen here if self-proclaimed “Islamic separatists” set off a couple bombs and killed a bunch of people. You’d have every Right-wing loon calling for concentration camps and martial law to deal with the threat. But since it was a Christian sect who was planning on killing gubmint agents, what do we get?
[crickets]
Exactly.
Jim Downey
(Cross posted to dKos.)
I don’t think most people here in the US understand violence. They have too little experience with it. They think violence is a schoolyard fight, or gunplay in slow motion on a screen.
It’s more visceral than that. More basic. It is the unleashing of an older part of ourselves – a genetic memory of survival.
For decades I have watched reactionary forces strut and hype, threatening violence or implying the threat of violence. You see it with the rhetoric of the Tea Party in its latest incarnation. I’ve kept an eye on it, but never paid it too much attention – people fear change, and those fears sometime manifest as that kind of low-level violence. Oh, I don’t mean to deny the damage that a few lone loons can do – our history has shown repeatedly that political violence can indeed change the course of events for the short term. But even that is limited.
What worries me much more is something I have begun to see over the last few years, and in increasing amounts recently: rhetoric from the left which is starting to match the threats of violence from the right. It is always cloaked in terms of self-defense, or of ‘standing up to the right’ – but it is there, nonetheless.
And this is much more dangerous. Because then it is not a matter of just ‘simple’ violence. It is gang-war. It is tribal. It is the madness which erases civilization for a while.
We don’t think that it can happen here. Not again. We think we are too advanced. Too educated. Too secure in our democratic structures.
Bullshit.
When one side starts using the language of violence, even to the point of flaunting guns and invoking the Civil War, they’re crazy.
When the other side decides the time has come to take the crazies seriously, to the point of talking about arming themselves or de-humanizing the Right (both of which I have seen a lot of in recent weeks), then we’re playing with fire.
It’s not like I am a pacifist, or unwilling to defend either myself or those people and values I hold dear. I understand the need for taking a threat from someone seriously. But increasingly things feel like they are starting to spin out of control.
Jim Downey
. . . how anything could go wrong with this:
PARIS (Reuters) – Thrill-seekers in France tired of the usual array of white-knuckle sports are turning to a bizarre new service to get their adrenaline rush — designer abduction.
For 900 euros ($1,226), clients of Ultime Realite (“Ultimate Reality”), a firm in eastern France, can buy a basic kidnap package where they’re bundled away, bound and gagged, and kept incarcerated for four hours.
Alternatively, they can opt for a more elaborate tailor-made psychodrama, involving an escape or helicopter chase for example, where costs can quickly escalate.
Note – this is supposed to happen at a time and a place which the client/victim does *not* know, to add to the realism of the experience.
When in college, me and a couple of college buddies came up with how much fun it would be to stage a ‘mafia hit’ in some nightclub, preparing all the special effects (guns shooting blanks, small charges in walls to simulate bullets striking them, blood packs on the victim and one of the hit men, et cetera). We thought it would be hilarious to set up such a thing and spring it on some unknowing nightclub patrons who would only be told that they were going to be attending a “special event”.
Of course, we gave up on the idea shortly after having a good laugh, because we knew that it was insane. Exposing people to that kind of traumatic event – even as just a witness – was dangerous and irresponsible. Not to mention that there could be someone (off duty cop? actual gangster?) with a real gun loaded with real bullets in the audience who would react poorly to such stimuli.
And that was under the reasonably controlled conditions of one room.
Now, these idiots want to pull this kind of stunt in public?
Dipshits.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 