There's a weird comfort in the idea that the more immediately violent/deadly a virus is, the less likely it is to succeed in the long term. On the other hand, what still gives me the creeping willies about ebola is that for the first week or two it presents as something akin to the flu, at which point it's communicable.

Anthrax is the gold standard of area denial bioweapons because it's stable as hell, incubates forever, spreads easily and the only way to kill it is to bake the dirt it lives in to 400 degrees.

It's also pretty non-communicable from person to person which strikes me as pretty damn important when you're dealing with BW. Seems like a hell of a gamble to dump something terrible on a population without controlling for blowback.

You want a fun laundry list of scary stuff that could be used against anybody by just about anybody, pick up this book:

Actually, don't. Larry Wayne Harris is totally crackerjacks, a white supremacist/separatist, a conspiracy theorist, and has been arrested on occasion for stockpiling anthrax (later revealed to be a harmless strain) and attempting to procure plague bacteria. Ostensibly the book was published as a kind of doomsday prepper handbook, but it reads more like a how-to guide re. well-poisoning and general mayhem-wreaking. Case in point, it starts off with a careful diagram of how to build a grenade launcher (plus grenade) out of hardware store items. You know, because that helps you protect against potential BW attacks, I guess?

Got my hands on this for my final project in college in order to make a point about how easy it is to find how-to literature re. homemade WMD. Flashy move, helped get me an A, but I'm pretty sure that purchase alone put me on all sorts of watchlists. And if that didn't, uploading a pic of it onto a messageboard and then executing back-to-back Google searches on "Larry Wayne Harris," "Anthrax communicability," and "Yersinia Pestis" probably will.

Dear NSA: I'm not a terrorist. But you already know that, don't you?