Comment by gibba999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gibba999 | Hacker News Reader

Without commenting on China specifically, a few facts:

- The cheapest, safest way to "invade" the US (or any Western democracy) isn't through an army, but through manipulation of news, social media, and elections

- Indeed, if I'm Iran and I want Iraq attacked, it's much cheaper to manipulate the US into doing the dirty work than to attack myself.

- Much of the same is true of corporations -- a million spend lobbying can "buy" hundreds of millions in corrupt (but usually legal) profits.

- The checks-and-balances put in 250 years ago aren't adequate to defend democracy.

As a footnote: The second-cheapest way is through asymmetric attacks, such as cyberattacks, and increasingly, bioattacks. I don't want a debate about COVID19 origins, vaccines, or what-not (please don't), but the fact of the matter is that engineering a virus like COVID19 is within the grasp of most nation-states. That vulnerability went from theoretical to very, very visible. Genetic engineering will only get better. It's not implausible that soon we'll be able to engineer viruses which lead to long-term disability, decrease the IQ of a nation, or are at least somewhat selective by ethnicity (of course, once released, all bets are off). It's definitely possible to have vaccine-in-hand when releasing a bioweapon.

You are right about your points, except that I think even with a vacine in hand you risk too much with an effective bioweapon, and you will look guilty as fuck if you somehow have a vacine in time (with sufficient production) and the rest of the world does not.

I do wonder (and I am not proposing anything here), that without the gatekeepers and with the industrialized spread of information on the internet, that we have reached a point where we can no longer have freedom of speech, simply because it makes it too easy to spread things. Are we forced to got into "information lockdown", and if so what is to stop it from becoming perpetual?

Agreed.

Whether a relatively paltry (harmless compared to conventional bioweapons) virus like COVID was ever considered as a weapon hardly matters at this point. What really scares the absolute poop out of me is that the west has shown its hand, and exposed stress fractures that could easily be exploited by foreign actors.

I'd say that the lines between what you have delineated as first and second cheapest attacks are obscure. Cyber/bio/etc attacks are now a means of accomplishing "informational" attacks.

Perhaps I've been deceived by traditional and social media and the scale of antivax, QAnon, MAGA movements are blown out of proportion, but if a foreign actor ever wanted to deliver a significant blow to the west, it would be to influence and exploitation of theses movements in very slow and deliberate ways. Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.

(It's not just the antivax/QAnon/MAGA movements that scare me either. In my opinion, anti-American whataboutist/hyper-socialist/pro-communist are just as concerning.)

Maybe this is already the case. Then again I might be no less paranoid than the followers of these movements.

I know I'm not the first to point this out and I'm only regurgitating what has already been stated, but I only see a few ways this will/can unfold. The west will...

- become more authoritarian to deal with the civilly insubordinate - descend into chaos and anarchy as influence dwindles - i dunno...

While western military defense remains unassailable, there is a huge gaping hole in its ability to deter non-conventionial aggression and encroachment.

> Effectively destabilizing and splintering western societies.

There's a biological analogy where a predator can't move into a niche if its already populated.

In the USA we already have groups we're not allowed to criticize, we're only permitted to fight with each other about how rabidly we support them more than inferior people whom don't support them as much as we do, look at my halo, etc. Or there are countries with influence over us that we aren't allowed to name much less complain about.

China can't move in to predate us, those spots are already full. Or to put it more explicitly, the 50 cent army can't move in on the turf of the baizuo.

Likewise there is an interesting biological/ecological analogy where the vast majority of the population are pretty sick of the baizuo, but if they were marginalized then we wouldn't enter a golden era of freedom; we'd just rapidly get sick of the 50 cent army after its expansion into the vacuum.

Interesting hypothesis, but it doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny. The most obvious counterexample is that the foreign state actors (not China but others) could successfully suborn and control several of these niches, and steer the groupthink of these groups in a direction favourable to themselves: Most obviously the take-over of the NRA in 2015 and the successful influence campaign on the "gun nut" niche by the Russian state; but there are countless other examples.

That's an interesting hypothesis: The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon.

What's interesting is the dynamic between the epi community and the security community. I'm not sure if I'm naming those correctly:

* The security community does a lot of threat modeling (how might we be attacked? how might we have been attacked?), which is helpful. That doesn't suggest they believe those things actually happened.

* The epi community views this as coded language for believing in bizarre conspiracy theories.

> The antivax/antimask/etc. movements as social media manipulation in preparation for a bioweapon

Not what I was saying, so apologies if that's how it reads. I'm saying very passive "bioweapons" could be used to cause stress, increase societal friction, disrupt normality, etc over extended periods of time... effectively destabilizing societies from within, causing governments to take their eyes off the ball, letting down their guard, etc...

What's interesting is that the government (forget which department and paper) did have a plan. They had accounted for this scenario. But I guess there's a chasm between having a plan and being able to put it into practice.

What is "epi"?

Epidemiology.

Different scientific communities use different scientific methods, and often come to vastly different conclusions as a result. Epi, and related communities, uses frequentist statistical methods. It's an interesting dynamic when two communities have research methods which fundamentally conflict.

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