House Intelligence Committee member warns US of DNA based bio-weapons and Chinese data collection

Congressman Jason Crow from Colorado said last Friday that bio-weapons exist and are being designed to target and kill specific people using DNA technology.

According to the Washington Examiner, Crow said, "There are now weapons under development, and developed, that are designed to target specific people." The Congressman specified, "you can actually take someone's DNA, 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, a former Army Ranger and veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is on committees that oversee the Pentagon and the US intelligence community and made the comments at the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado.

"People will very rapidly spit into a cup and send it to 23andMe and get really interesting data about their background — and guess what? Their DNA is now owned by a private company," Crow said while naming the popular genetic testing and ancestry site.

In the 23andMe website's "law enforcement guide", the company states that they try to "resist requests from law enforcement, and we do not share customer data with any public databases."

Information from the site must be obtained through a subpoena or warrant 23andMe states. However, according to Axios, 23andMe has turned over their data to outside researchers and companies, as has Ancestry.com.

Crow said that "data is actually going to be procured and collected by our adversaries for the development of these systems." According to The Daily Mail, it was revealed in 2019 that several Russian and Chinese labs were processing DNA tests for Americans who used Medicare and Medicaid.

"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," Crow said of the DNA collection services.

According to the Washington Examiner, Senator Joni Ernst also said the same technological developments extends beyond human targeting and will be aimed at spreading diseases and harming agriculture.

"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 ... highly pathogenic avian influenza, African swine fever," Ernst said. "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."