The future of violence : robots and germs, hackers and drones--confronting a new age of threat
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"The ability to inflict pain and suffering on large groups of people is no longer limited to the nation-state. New technologies are putting enormous power into the hands of individuals across the world--a shift that, for all its sunny possibilities, entails enormous risk for all of us, and may even challenge the principles on which the modern nation state is founded. In short, if our national governments can no longer protect us from harm, they will lose their legitimacy. Detailing the challenges that states face in this new world, legal scholars Benjamin Wittes and Gabriella Blum controversially argue in [Title TK] that national governments must expand their security efforts to protect the lives and liberty of their citizens. Wittes and Blum show how advances in cybertechnology, biotechnology, and robotics mean that more people than ever before have access to technologies--from drones to computer networks and biological data--that could possibly be used to extort or attack states and private citizens. Security, too, is no longer only under governmental purview, as private companies or organizations control many of these technologies: internet service providers in the case of cyber terrorism and digital crime, or academic institutions and individual researchers and publishers in the case of potentially harmful biotechnologies. As Wittes and Blum show, these changes could undermine the social contract that binds citizens to their governments"--,Provided by publisher.