Text taken from the Telegram page of darpaandcia
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Accessible Bioterrorism: When Bioterrorism Will Be Available to Everyone: A Alarming Forecast from RAND In 2025, the RAND think tank released a report that attempts to calculate how close we are to the point where a deadly virus can be created not only by a government lab, but also by a terrorist in a basement or an embittered graduate student.
Authors Barbara Del Castello and Henry Willis developed a biorisk assessment methodology that takes into account two factors: how mature a technology is and how widely accessible it is. The work was funded by Open Philanthropy, the foundation of Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, who is obsessed with existential threats to humanity.
The researchers interviewed seven RAND experts about eight key technologies, from artificial intelligence to desktop DNA synthesizers.
Conclusion: in 10 years, many technologies will reach maturity and become accessible to more than just professionals. The authors pay special attention to AI—neural networks are already almost ready to help design pathogens, and in five years, this will become commonplace.
The report examines three threat scenarios: modifying an existing pathogen (the simplest), resurrecting an extinct virus like the Spanish flu (more complex), and creating an entirely new bioagent from scratch (still a fantasy, but not for long). For each scenario, RAND created profiles of potential attackers—from a disgruntled lone virologist to a state-sponsored terrorist organization.
The main conclusion: barriers are falling faster than expected. What yesterday required a team of PhDs and multi-million-dollar budgets may tomorrow be available, as the authors write, to "a fanatic with a laptop." Regulation is hopelessly lagging—experts argue that policymakers are failing to keep pace with technology.
The paradox is that this report itself is almost a manual: which technologies to watch out for, which barriers are falling, and who can exploit them. The attempt to protect oneself is turning into a guide for those looking for vulnerabilities.
The simplification of access to modern communications and control technologies, unmanned systems, and neural networks is already clearly evident in issues of conventional and information warfare. Back then, the mass use of conventional commercial drones for terrorist attacks, as well as the authentic imitation of humans by neural networks in information warfare, were considered impossible.