Journey

“I think one of the things we’re talking about here is there are now weapons under development and developed that are designed to target specific people.

That’s what this is. Where you can actually take someone’s DNA – 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.

So 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.

Young folks have very little expectation of privacy – that’s what the polling and the data show – and people will very rapidly spit into a cup and send it into 23andme and get really interesting data about their background, and guess what, their DNA is now owned by a private company – it can be sold off with very little intellectual property or privacy protection.

We don’t have legal and regulatory regimes to deal with that. So we have to have an open and public discussion and this is going to have to be a political discussion about what does the protection of health care 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. ”

~ Representative Jason Crow, Member, House Committee on Armed Services and House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence

Rep. Jason Crow

“… and I’ll add on as well – when we look on a broader level – who else needs to engage in this? Well it can be USDA – US Department of Agriculture – so not necessarily those specific human targets with a particular type of weaponized biological weapon, but also if we look at food security, and what can our adversaries do with biological weapons that are directed at our animal agriculture – at our agricultural sector – hoof and mouth disease, highly pathogenic avian influenza, African swine fever – all of these things have circulated around the globe, but if targeted by an adversary, we know that it brings about food insecurity.

Food insecurity drives a lot of other insecurities around the globe.

So a few years ago I had a big fight in the NDAA where we were talking about putting in protections for our food sources here in the United States but once you paint food security as a national security – it got included, so there’s a number of ways we can look at biological weapons and the need to make sure we are not only securing human beings, but then also the food that will sustain us.”

~ Senator Joni Ernst, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, Senate Armed Services Committee

Senator Joni Ernst