Moreover, a team of people scouring open sources (i.e. publication records, job specs, equipment supply chains) could potentially make it difficult for a lab to get away with doing bad research, and thereby strengthen the [BWC] treaty.
Here’s quite a good article calling for the same thing, which also outlines lots of promising avenues for open-source investigation (in addition to the above; trade data, patents, social media, satellite imagery, unusual epidemic reports, and environmental sampling):
Paints it as an appropriately weighty task though, I quite liked this quote:
It’s something like searching for needles in 193 country-sized haystacks, each of which differs in size, structure, and complexity and might not contain any needles at all. The needles might not look like needles, either – they might exist only as needle components waiting to be put together
Here’s quite a good article calling for the same thing, which also outlines lots of promising avenues for open-source investigation (in addition to the above; trade data, patents, social media, satellite imagery, unusual epidemic reports, and environmental sampling):
Can everyone help verify the bioweapons convention? Perhaps, via open source monitoring
Paints it as an appropriately weighty task though, I quite liked this quote: