INTRODUCTION

This is an extremely difficult one for me to admit.

I care about privacy. I spend time every day managing cookies and hardening my digital footprint (insufficient I know). I do the work; a few minutes of my time, every day.

The truth is that I've been trying to find a way around it, consciously and unconsciously, for a very long time, to no avail. At this point, I have to raise the white flag and replace one of the pillars that holds the views that define my perception of the current state of our civilization, that defines me as an individual. To understand why I am willing to surrender this pillar of my identity, we must look back at the evolutionary trajectory that brought us here.

The timeline I'm about to present to you is one to be proud of as a species. It has been an ongoing search that took us from living precariously on tree branches, eyes and ears in full alert motivated by the fear of being found by a climbing-proficient predator, to listening to the hypothetical (and extremely underwhelming) sound of two black holes merging derived from the infinitesimal precision that detecting gravitational waves requires.

It is also, due to the competitive nature of the need to adapt and survive, a weapons race. Survival of the fittest, the best adapted.

As it always was, as it always will be. It's not personal; it's just evolution.
 

THE DESTRUCTIVE POWER OF A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL

For the sake of brevity let's skip the period from unicellular organisms to the advent of Homo sapiens sapiens.

The relentless technological improvement that is a trademark of our species has translated into a constant improvement of our tools. This applies, perhaps more than in any other field, to our tools for killing.

For most of our history, our killing potential was bound by little more than our own reach aided by some craftsmanship and advances in metallurgy. Blade-based weaponry such as knives, swords, axes kept the destructive power of a single individual unchanged; a slight improvement came through longer-distance weapons, throwable spears and archery; still not much to worry about unless you are the unlucky target.

The first significant change came with the invention of firearms, not with the early versions, since they were so cumbersome that they were little more than one extra kill before reverting back to the good old blunt force applied blades, but with the development of the more advanced semi-automatic and automatic weapons. The head count increases but it is meaningless in terms of a species scale.

Explosives were another step up: big numbers, at its worst real damage, hurt enough to arguably start a cycle of retaliations that can have significant implications at a local scale, nothing to change the philosophy of our civilization. The mother of explosions, fission, fusion; not available to single individuals.

The true inflection point, the one that changes the entire equation, is the democratization of catastrophic power. It's the arrival of basement-level biochemistry, garage biohacking, and the astonishingly precise toolkit of CRISPR. Unlike a nuclear warhead, which requires state-level resources, the components for an engineered pathogen are becoming exponentially cheaper and more accessible. The barrier to entry isn't industrial might; it's specialized knowledge, which is now disseminated globally online.

This new power creates a chilling potential. A single, motivated individual or a small, unknown cell could theoretically engineer a virus with the contagiousness of measles and the lethality of Ebola. An accidental leak from a poorly secured 'biohacking' lab could be just as devastating. The threat is no longer a state-level actor deciding to launch missiles; it's a disgruntled PhD student, a well-meaning but reckless amateur, or a doomsday cult with a biology degree. They could bring civilization to its knees, or wipe it out, before we even identify the pathogen.
 

JUST A FIGHTING CHANCE

The sheer number of individuals means that regardless of motivations the recurrence of these events will be a statistical certainty.

If we accept this premise, the question becomes: how do we implement this necessary evil in a 'good' way? How do we build a system that can detect a lone wolf acquiring pathogen precursors without simultaneously creating a tool for absolute political oppression? The 'good' way cannot be a blank check for security agencies. It must be a new social contract, one built on radical transparency (of the watchers, not just the watched), strict legislative oversight, and technological safeguards. It means shifting from monitoring people to monitoring capabilities.

We will need a massive amount of energy and resources invested in their prevention just to have a fighting chance. Thankfully the infrastructure for the automation and optimization of our future processes and the inherent monitoring of every single event is already being built.

We need to mature as a society and admit we need this capability. We must allow it to come out of the shadows. Make no mistake, it is already happening. Edward Snowden informed us of this spectacularly in 2013. Since then, global data traffic has grown massively, and we must assume the technology, resources, and resolve to monitor it have grown.

A domestic-only solution is insufficient; the threat is global, and a tool this powerful cannot be in the hands of a single government. The solution must be an international oversight agency, something like the IAEA for biosecurity and other existential threats. Its board must be composed not of politicians or spies, but of individuals with pristine public track records, deep technical backgrounds, and most importantly a history of fighting for privacy and civil liberties.

This agency's mandate would be razor-thin: to monitor only for signatures of catastrophic threat acquisition (e.g., procurement of specific pathogen DNA, large-scale social media analysis of AI-generated bioweapon plans). All findings would require a warrant from an agile international tribunal operating in near-real-time to be passed to an equally responsive national law enforcement. Its audits, its algorithms, and its failures would be public. This is the only way to build public trust, placing the 'watchers' themselves under intense, permanent, and transparent scrutiny.

Hence my nomination: Mr. Snowden, would you please fulfill this paradox?