Sometimes Slashdot is extremely infuriating. On the one hand people behind the site run around slamming Microsoft for its tactics, especially on a lot of the nonsense Microsoft puts out to tout its products’ alleged superiority. On the other hand, people like Jeff “Hemos” Bates demonstrate that they are just as shallow as soon as they step outside their narrow range of Linux advocacy.
What’s annoying me at the moment is a review by Bates of John Schwartz and Michael Osterholm’s book, Living Terrors. The books is one of several out now hyping the alleged dangers of bioterrorism.
First, the threat of bioterrorism is vastly overstated. As Jonathan Tucker’s Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons concludes,
Crude delivery methods are likely to remain the most common forms of chemical and biological warfare terrorism. They are potentially capable of inflicting at most tens to hundreds of fatalities—within the destructive range of high-explosive bombs, but not the mass deaths predicted by the most alarmist scenarios. Although the devastating potential of a “catastrophic” event of chemical and biological warfare use warrants examination, history suggests that the most probable terrorist use of chemical and biological warfare agents will be tactical and relatively small-scale.
We are likely to see bioterrorism, but they will be small scale attacks much like the release of sarin gas in the a Japanese subway a few years ago rather than massive disease outbreaks that kill thousands of people.
Even more annoying, though, is that Bates makes an error in the introduction to his review which could have been fact checked with a quick web search. According to Bates,
Given the recent reports on the almost total lack of security in places like Russia’s facility for holding the smallpox virus, their Cold War manufacturing of thousands of tons of the stuff, and the FBI sting operation of someone in Las Vegas trying to buy anthrax, the book’s subject matter hits even closer to home.
The Las Vegas “FBI sting operation” almost certainly refers to the 1998 arrest of William Leavitt, Jr. and Larry Wayne Harris. The FBI accused Leavitt and Harris of buying anthrax in order to create a biological weapon, and their arrest was a high profile news story that earned the two a good deal of time on national news broadcasts for a few days.
There was only one problem: what Leavitt and Harris actually bought was a vaccine for animal anthrax. The claim that the two had anthrax and were going to make a biological weapon came solely from an FBI information who had been previously convicted of extortion and at the time was party to several lawsuits.
All charges related to bioterrorism were dropped by the government and Leavitt was released. Although charges against Harris were dropped, he also faced charges related to violation of his parole.
I found all of the above information out by simply doing a Google search for “Las Vegas anthrax”. Is it really asking too much for Bates and others at Slashdot who seem to see themselves as uber geeks to do the same? Please, do us a favor and tear yourself away from Princess Mononoke long enough to do a little fact checking.