Now is dramatically better than a year ago.  It's not even comparable.  Rewrite the cover sheet on your policy idea and ping your network. 

The incoming leadership has a massive amount of flexibility, given that they're fundamentally reshaping so many things at once, but in many cases just have vague ideas rather than specific programs.  Give them specific proposals that they can align with their vague pronouncements.

Bureaucrats are finding themselves taking on responsibilities for people who were shifted out the door in a hurry, and have incoming leadership who need staff support badly.  The survivors will likely have much more leeway than they did before to stop doing things they don't want to do, and start doing things they do.

Private sector actors are confronted with government agencies that are in disarray and distracted.  Now is a great time to take action.

Uncertainty creates a lot of anxiety, so if you're generally afraid of your own shadow, you'll turtle up and hope the storm passes.  Given that so many others are doing exactly that, someone ambitious has an opportunity to shape reality around themselves to a degree which was absolutely not possible last year.  This is a great time to get stuff done, as long as you're razor focused on the specific things you actually want.

That being said, if you haven't spent the last few years working on developing relationships with people in those groups, you might have a problem. They're probably not talking to anyone they didn't trust before all this chaos started.

The disarray within the executive branch right now has created an amazing window of opportunity. If you have a clear policy objective, you can probably find someone, somewhere to give you a fair hearing.

New officials looking to create radical departures from the previous admin's policies are one route. Career bureaucrats who have survived the cuts, and find themselves suddenly empowered because their supervision did not survive the curs are another.  And finally, actors within the private sector may discover that while the laws themselves have not changed, what is effectively enforced is likely to be different (some things more restrictive, some things much less).

Good luck!

Sounds like it's working well when you have a shared culture. The more you agree on norms of behavior in terms of what's appropriate for kids, how and when to discipline  how to speak to kids, etc the better it works.  Religion probably helped with this historically.

I wrote about something similar previously: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Ek7M3xGAoXDdQkPZQ/terrorism-tylenol-and-dangerous-information#a58t3m6bsxDZTL8DG

I agree that 1-2 logs isn't really in the category of xrisk.  The longer the lead time on the evil plan (mixing chemicals, growing things, etc), the more time security forces have to identify and neutralize the threat.  So all things being equal, it's probably better that a would be terrorist spends a year planning a weird chemical thing that hurts 10s of people, vs someone just waking up one morning and deciding to run over 10s of people with a truck.  

There's a better chance of catching the first guy, and his plan is way more expensive in terms of time, money, access to capital like LLM time, etc.  Sure someone could argue about pandemic potential, but lab origin is suspected for at least one influenza outbreak and a lot of people believe it about covid-19.  Those weren't terrorists.

I guess theoretically, there may be cyberweapons that qualify as wmd, but those will be because of the systems they interact with.  It's not the cyberweapon itself, it's the nuclear reactor accepting commands that lead to core damage.

This seems incredibly reasonable, and in light of this, I'm not really sure why anyone should embrace ideas like making LLMs worse at biochemistry in the name of things like WMDP: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WspwSnB8HpkToxRPB/paper-ai-sandbagging-language-models-can-strategically-1

Biochem is hard enough that we need LLMs at full capacity pushing the field forward.  Is it harmful to intentionally create models that are deliberately bad at this cutting edge and necessary science in order to maybe make it slightly more difficult for someone to reproduce cold war era weapons that were considered both expensive and useless at the time?

Do you think that crippling 'wmd relevance' of LLMs is doing harm, neutral, or good?

You sound really confident, can you elaborate on your direct lab experience with these weapons, as well as clearly define 'military grade' vs whatever the other thing was?

How does 'chem/bio' compare to high explosives in terms of difficulty and effect?

Luxembourg and Belgium during WWI are case studies of this.

Humanitarian food aid was shipped to Belgium via the US led CRB, so labor unions were able to stop work, and Belgium mostly didn't contribute to the war machine.

The 1916 miner's strike in Luxembourg was broken by the Germans withholding food.  No effort like the CRB to support resistance could be mounted by the US and Allies.

In terms of breaking the hold of tyrants on humanity, probably the most significant technical development would be a household or apartment building scale device that converts electricity, water, and air into protein; sugar is easy.  Solein claims to have developed this (their microbe works at the 'space station' scale), but they're opting to build large factories and take advantage of economies of scale instead of pushing out the equipment to the masses.

What is a reasonable response to an unsolicited message saying 'someone has hired someone to harm you', with scant details on who/what/when/where?

Personally, I'd read it, and the more seriously I took it, the less likely I would be to engage with the sender, I likely would not send an acknowledgement of receipt. Any additional communication from the sender, especially a message with an 'ask' like 'help me figure out who' or 'assist me in making internet content' would be viewed as extortion.

If someone showed up at my door, I might talk to them, and if they're a cop, I'd tell the cop that I'm concerned about the vaguely threatening messages I've gotten from 'some guy in another country'.

If you don't have much information ('just a social media name'), doing more 'sleuthing' is probably totally inappropriate.  The 'contractor' may or may not have done more, but either way, you're not really helping anything.

As far as law enforcement seeing you as a suspect/time waster/scammer, that's an easy one.  A cyber crime office will hear you confessing to some kind of 'hacking', other offices will hear that you have no actual details (so someone unknown, is threatening someone who is also unknown, no further details?  Sure ok I'll log it) and just assume you wasted their time.  Calling back to ask about status as a 'helpful tipster' suggests that you're motivated by something other than a desire to inform them, and let them prioritize your information.  This would likely be seen as suspicious.

Most agencies have an escalation path and can do 'international' effectively, they just have to really want to do it.  In this case, from what you've told us, I totally understand why you've gotten the response you've gotten.  

An online murder for hire website, where the people hiring are mostly larpers, the people taking the jobs are scammers, and the victims are basically unidentified is at best a loot pinata for someone with asset forfeiture authorities.  Assuming they can actually seize the crypto.

You might have better luck tracing crypto to exchanges, passing that information to national level cybercrime squads, and asking for 10% if they can seize anything (most agencies have policies like this).

You're not doing anything immoral by just ignoring your archive.  Working on 'spec' in public safety usually just leads to sadness.  You're in a weird place where you're facing the kind of problem a mid or late career professional sees, but without social support from people who have seen this stuff before, and without easing into it like you would have in an early career.  So you have the problem, but none of the emotional tools to address it.

As far as the situation specifically, making a form letter saying something like 'someone has paid x $ to do you harm through (description of the service), further details are available upon request', and sending it to as many prospective victims as you can identify, is probably as much as you can reasonably be expected to do.

Sure, local law enforcement should probably do it, you won't find everyone, and someone you do find might come back and cause you problems for "making threats", so in your situation, I probably wouldn't even bother going that far, but you seem pretty committed to doing "something".  So that should be an achievable end that lets you move on emotionally.  

It's hard to talk about analogous situations without saying things that are impolite.  Feel free to PM me if you have questions or details you're not comfortable sharing, I've worked with "bad stuff" before, and might be able to help.

"People ask me to tell them my worst stories.  I used to tell them, but as it turns out, nobody really wants to hear them" is a common sentiment.