| Abstrakt: |
The Internet has had disruptive effects on how scientific research is conducted, how education is delivered and knowledge transmitted, how health services are provided, and how individuals and organizations communicate and do business. We postulate that the emergence of the Internet, and in particular the rise of commercial transactions conducted over the Internet (e-commerce), is having a major disruptive effect on biological arms control. The project we conducted, as reported in this paper, aims to support our supposition. The current approach to prevent the proliferation of biological weapons development relies heavily on the existence of effective export controls for equipment particularly suitable for use in the production or dissemination of biological agents. The Australia Group (AG), an informal forum that brings together 41 countries and the European Union, seeks to harmonize national export controls on such equipment. We state our concern that the rise in biotechnology e-commerce will significantly disrupt the effectiveness of current efforts undertaken by AG participants. As we make clear in this paper, we are concerned with the emergence of e-commerce in dual-use equipment; i.e., equipment that is useable for the production, processing, and dissemination of biological agents. Our primary focus is on equipment listed on the AG's Dual-use Biological Equipment and Related Technology and Software list (AG Biological List for short), which are referred hereafter as AG-grade items. We investigated the extent to which AG-grade items from eight equipment categories are available from Internet vendors. These categories are: Fermenters; Centrifugal separators; Cross (tangential) flow filtration equipment; Freeze-drying equipment; Spray-drying equipment; Protective and containment equipment; Aerosol inhalation chambers; and Spraying or fogging systems and components therefor. Our research depended largely on tracking down vendors of AG-grade items on the Internet and investigating their wares and business tactics. We focused on vendors headquartered in non-AG participating countries, such as China, India, and Russia. Our searches found AG-grade equipment from at least seven out of these nine categories offered for sale online. Our analysis of the information provided by vendors on their websites found that a significant proportion of them were particularly vulnerable to proliferator exploitation. These typically were small firms with limited resources, facing significant competition, and offering transactions of single units (for example, a single fermenter, or a single Class III biosafety cabinet, etc.). We found no indication that the vendors in question are cognizant that they are offering to sell AG-grade equipment; i.e., that their offered product has the potential to be misused for BW applications. At the same time, we emphasize that we do not allege that any of the vendors we name in this paper are involved in illicit activities. Since vendors did not disclose information about their export policies on their websites, we attempted to contact several AG-grade equipment vendors with questions about their export policies. We had no success; i.e., none replied to our queries. All AG-grade items are inherently dual-use, with both legitimate and illicit end uses. A biotechnology equipment order intended for a biological warfare (BW) program can therefore appear identical to an order going to a legitimate end user. Transactions serving BW programs can be carried out openly, in effect hiding in plain sight amongst lawful transactions. Compounding these issues, we found that online vendors routinely offered payment options that could be utilized by unscrupulous buyers to hide their identities and to launder funds. In the course of the project, we found that a host of new biotechnology innovations had emerged in the last ten or more years that potentially have BW-related applications and are being offered for sale by vendors on the Internet. Of the newly emerged technologies, we are particularly concerned about the dual-use applications of algae photobioreactors, freeze-dryer gas sterilization upgrade kits, hand-held aerosol generators, DNA kits, synthetic biology kits, and 3D bioprinters. These technologies are not listed by the AG, although we believe that they should be to some degree. We have included a brief overview of these technologies and documented their online availability to facilitate discussion on this issue. Thanks to the Internet, we found it relatively easy to gather large amounts of information about vendors that was useful for comparing the many offerings of dual-use items. We assume that would-be proliferators would be similarly able to conduct Internet searches that would allow them to rapidly discover and instantaneously contact large numbers of AG-grade item vendors. We fear that the availability of these items, as well as the characteristics of the AG-grade equipment vendors, poses a significant challenge to all states attempting to preempt, identify, or interdict purchases by would-be proliferators. To highlight the combined disruptive impact of the new trends in international business, we compare how Iraq's BW procurement network operated in the 1970s and 1980s with how a modern-day proliferator could use the Internet to acquire the equipment necessary for instituting a modern BW program. Finally, we offer a number of recommendations for participating AG states. These include: suggested outreach efforts to online sales companies; suggested ways of ensuring e-commerce industry input is heard; means to improve the monitoring of online biotechnology equipment offers and sales; and a new process for updating the AG biotechnology list. These suggestions have the potential to alleviate, albeit not solve, the problems raised in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
