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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

The US chemical weapons program is downright frightening. Unlike these exploits which you can just leave in an office and never use (and which con subsequently go stale as people find and patch exploits), chemical weapons were stored in massive US facilities and many of them have started leaking over the years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjA0EQPeUGM

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> The US chemical weapons program is downright frightening.

Was: they committed to destroying those weapons, and have been doing so for 24 years. They were 89.75% complete in 2012. The video you linked was from 1973.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_chemical_weapons...

Just like they committed to revealing exploits to the tech industry instead of hoarding them?

It sounds like you're just saying this without doing any kind of real comparison between the probably very different scenarios.

> Just like they committed to revealing exploits to the tech industry instead of hoarding them?

I think you're letting your cynicism get in the way of truth and understanding.

The US has signed and ratified a treaty committing to destroy all chemical weapons and never produce them again [1], and it has built the infrastructure to do so [2] [3].

It's conspiracy-nut territory to think the US is simultaneously stockpiling chemical weapons in some super-secret program without good evidence for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_Weapons_Convention

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u-ACe1CBfA

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wftLydix0Nw

> It's conspiracy-nut territory

While I agree, it was also considered conspiracy-nut territory to have believed most of the stuff in this leak. Look at how the wider tech community treats people like McAffee and Stallman.

What's that Sincliar quote people like to throw around on here again? Oh yeah, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

> McAfee

Yeah, why won't people respect the opinions of a meth-cooking, bath-salt abusing, murderer who lived in Belize with underage 'girlfriends'?

Mass surveillance was conspiracy nut territory.

Wide spread market fixing, libor, gold, silver was conspiracy nut territory.

The US engaging in blscksites and systematic torture was conspiracy nut territory.

But criticizing your pro Government apologia only results in comments being banned and removed -- perhaps just more conspiracy nut territory?

So where's your evidence that the US is secretly stockpiling chemical weapons? Note: a cynical claim that "they're all liars." is not evidence.

Or am I supposed to trust a stopped clock [the nuts] since it was shown to be right twice a day?

I am taking issue with this. This was not conspiracy wing nut theory. As far back as 2004 cybersecurity (for lack of a better term) experts were reporting repeatedly that governments (not just the USA) were exponentially using exploits, as were other unknown or non-govt actors, and other techniques for malicious reasons, from spying on citizens to hacking infrastructure. Here's just a nice litmus of that:

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04321.pdf

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB424/docs/Cyber-027.pdf

https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0920/070.html

here is even a hertiage foundation report talking about sharing privacy keeping technologies with the government in the name of 'fighting terrorism'

http://www.heritage.org/homeland-security/report/technologie...

http://www.heritage.org/defense/report/information-oversight...

and here is the ACLU sounding the alarm in August of 2004:

https://www.aclu.org/files/FilesPDFs/surveillance_report.pdf

Ironically, its around the same time the NSA purported to have their own 'rules' in how they gather, which were obtained here:

https://epic.org/privacy/nsa/foia/EPIC-NSA-USSID-18-and-Dome...

and of course, not more than a few years later we have these reports:

https://www.eff.org/pages/calea-faq

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/12/behind-the-legal...

It was never a wing nut conspiracy theory. Its just nobody was looking close enough to care.

It was the scale of this kind of thing that was considered conspiracy theory.

It's not even that. Reading through the ample material I have cited it's clear that the scale was well defined. The ACLU even cited it as one of their primary concerns and even in the PBS doc they mention that it's a atrial evolution and that was in 2001.

I'm not convinced in any way this couldn't be foreseen if people would've paid more attention

There's a bit of difference between mass surveillance and the infrastructure necessary for a viable chemical weapons program. Assuming a major nation state would even want to, considering their rather limited tactical value on the modern battlefield.

Anyhow, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons out of The Hague oversees compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention. That includes verifying the destruction of stockpiles and weapons facilities as well as industry inspections that closely monitor precursors, as well as investigating cases of alleged production or usage. As of last October, 93% of declared stockpiles has been destroyed and independently verified by the OPCW. You don't have to take the US government's word for their numbers.

How can one not have a whole giant mountain of cynicism with all we've become aware of in the last few years? We could just as easily turn the tables and call you irresponsibly naive.

While I get where you're coming from with cynicism, any deployment of chemical weapons by a belligerent is almost certainly a war crime under several international accords, most notably the Geneva Protocol[0]. As someone upthread pointed out, their production is also the subject of several more. All the NSA/CIA disclosures we've seen thus far are not, themselves, war crimes. The international community, with some exceptions, came to the consensus that chemical weapons are not a good thing about a century ago, while offensive hacking is a much more recent development (obviously) and basically the wild west right now. Comparing chemical weapons to offensive hacking simply because they're both big government naughties is disingenuous, to say the least.

My bar of cynicism is a little higher when you're talking about the United States discretely stockpiling mustard gas versus taking down a smartphone, you know? (Maybe I, too, am irresponsibly naive.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Protocol

Ah, yes, war crimes. The US definitely fears those, and would absolutely never shoot on POWs, rape civilians, commit mass murder, drop chemical weapons on fighters and civilians indiscriminately, use multiple atomic bombs on civilians, torture, etc. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes)

They are so terribly afraid of committing war crimes they do not recognize the International Crime Court and are reading to invade any country trying an american soldier.

Surely the US would never do that!

All I said was my cynicism bar is a little higher for war crimes as opposed to hacking a phone, or capturing email. That's it. Not trying to argue or state any position or claim beyond that.

More importantly, it's a bit stupid/outdated to stockpile dangerous stuff when you have the facilities to produce it if/when it is actually needed.

I think the idea of it was that if a war happened the facilities to create it would be bombed.

A few things that were considered conspiracy nut territory have been revealed to be true over the last few years. It might be time to stop throwing that dismissive pejorative around when talking about (at the very least) our western governments.

The official policy is to use the VEP. https://epic.org/privacy/cybersecurity/vep/

I did not watch you link, but many modern chemical weapons are binary compounds. Meaning the two compounds has to be mixed to get the final weapon. This makes leaking etc, not as big problem as leaking of actual chemical weapons...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_chemical_weapon

Once things start leaking you're a very small step away from them mixing accidentally.

Unless containment has been set up in such a way that this is a geographical impossibility (for instance, on two sides of the Rocky mountains to stop accidental mixing in groundwater).

That is one of the saddest 30 minutes of video I have seen up to date.

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