"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," Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., an Army Ranger and member of the House Intelligence Committee told the Aspen Security Forum on Friday, the Daily Mail reported.
"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 actually have very little expectation of privacy, that's what the polling and the data show."
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Crow, who served three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, cautioned Americans about private companies like Ancestry, 23andMe, Habit, Helix, and MyHeritage getting Americans to submit their DNA voluntarily.
"People will very rapidly spit into a cup and send it to 23andMe a nd get really interesting data about their background," Crow said. "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."
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23andMe has argued it does not sell the private information it gathers, but it is among the many DNA services that do supply information to police performing forensic investigations.
Also, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, has warned about U.S. rivals using DNA bioweapons to target America's food supply.
"Food insecurity drives a lot of other insecurities around the globe," Ernst said, the Daily Mail reported. "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."
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Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., has even pointed at China for acquiring private DNA information.
"It is ridiculous that our current policies enable the Chinese Communist Party to access Americans' genomic data," Rubio wrote in a statement. "There is absolutely no reason that Beijing, which routinely seeks to undermine U.S. national security, should be handed the genomic data of American citizens."
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