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Intro: A member of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee warned that bio-weapons are being made that use a target's DNA to only kill that personSpeaking at the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, US Rep Jason Crow of Colorado warned Americans to not be so cavalier about sharing their DNA with private companies due to the coming of the new type of weapon. . 'You can actually take someone's DNA, take, you know, their medical profile and you can target a biological weapon that will kill that person or take them off the battlefield or make them inoperable,' Crow said. . .
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'You can't have a discussion about this without talking about privacy and the protection of commercial data because expectations of privacy have degraded over the last 20 years,' the Democratic lawmaker said.
'Young folks actually have very little expectation of privacy, that's what the polling and the data show."
Crow,
a former Army Ranger who served three tours of duty in Iraq and
Afghanistan, continued: 'People will very rapidly spit into a cup and
send it to 23andMe and get really interesting data about their
background.'
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House intelligence committee speaks about new DNA bio-weapons that can target a single person.jpg)
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'You can take someone's DNA and design a weapon that can kill them': House intelligence committee member warns people not to share health data with sites like 23andMe because it can be used to program new bio-weapons to target them
✓ . . .'And guess what? Their DNA is now owned by a private company. It can be sold off with very little intellectual property protection or privacy protection and we don't have legal and regulatory regimes to deal with that.'
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'We have to have an open and public discussion about... what the protection of healthcare information, DNA information, and your data look like because that data is actually going to be procured and collected by our adversaries for the development of these systems.'
23andMe has repeatedly stated that it does not sell off customers' private information, but other DNA companies have provided information to police upon request.
US Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the US rivals could use such DNA bio-weapons to target food supplies on a vast scale.
Ernst warned that biological weapons could be used to target specific animals that citizens, troops or cities depend on, bringing about scarcity and food insecurity to weaken people.
'Food insecurity drives a lot of other insecurities around the globe,' Ernst said.
'There's a number of ways we can look at biological weapons and the need to make sure not only are we securing human beings, but then also the food that will sustain us.'
Earlier this week, the Washington Examiner reported on just how easy it could be for privately-owned databases to be used to develop bioweapons such as the ones touted by Crow.
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✓ The publication explained how DNA belonging to a target - or the close relative of a target - could be stolen and used to form a biological weapon effective against that person only.
✓ That technology could lead to highly-targeted assassination programs, and also make it much harder for killers to be tracked down.
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Similar technology could be deployed against US agriculture by designing weapons which target only a certain breed of farm animal, or crop.
That could plunge the country into famine, and leave the US on its knees in the face of hostilities from a rival like Russia or China.
Army General Richard Clark, commander of the US Special Operations Command, highlighted how Russia had already shot to infamy with a less-sophisticated version of the same scheme.
. . . In 2018, Ancestry, 23andMe, Habit, Helix, and MyHeritage all signed on to the policy drafted with the help of The Future of Privacy Forum, a non-profit, in support of 'advancing responsible data practices in support of emerging technologies,' according to Gizmodo.
The guidelines, titled Privacy Best Practices for Consumer Genetic Testing Services and released on Tuesday, deal with scenarios where users' personally identifiable and anonymous genetic information might be shared with law enforcement (without a warrant) and other third parties.
✓✓✓ The new voluntary policies call for requiring separate consent from users before sharing 'individual-level information' with other businesses and more transparency about the number of requests for data received by, and fulfilled for, law enforcement.
While all the companies have said they agree to these standards of practice, there is no law enforcing the rules. '
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Posted: Jul 22, 2022
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Posted: Aug 24, 2022
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