Pentagon warns personnel not to use store bought DNA test kits

Question

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/nation-world/pentagon-warns-personnel-not-to-use-store-bought-dna-test-kits/507-92a3d2f9-a1ec-40b1-8cdd-620268ed2a2a and on TV

Comments

I spent 34 years in both the active duty and reserves.  All my injuries occurred when I believed what I was being told by those on high.  The reason I am still alive is because I soon learned to take everything they said with a huge snow shovel full of salt.

The cat has long since been out of the bag ever since social media became a 24-7 gossip line.  Having your family tree and DNA on ancestry is much less of a threat.

In fact I only did DNA testing for family tracking, because back in 1993 the Military took my DNA sample themselves.

Answer 1

They advise that is a potential security risk.

Comments

I suppose you could find out something you didn't know that could open you to blackmail. I do have cousins that won't test their DNA because they are afraid they'd find out they weren't full siblings or something like that.

Answer 2

The article is "clear as mud". It makes some hints, but never really spells out what it's getting at.

It just sounds to me like they don't want their personnel to get information from any place except the military itself. You could choose to look at t hat as "looking out for their guys", or (more likely) they don't want to deal with push-back if some commercial outfit tells you something different vs what they're telling them.

So we shouldn't make anything at all out of this. It's just another author climbing on board the paranoia train.

Answer 3

The article mentions both health-related information and other uses of DNA.  My guess is that if a member of the military engaged in an operation and was identified by DNA he'd left behind, in some circumstances such as covert actions, that would not be good for him or the U.S.  As far as health information is concerned, the worries seem to be similar to those for non-military people--losing health insurance, etc., as well as losing eligibility for some military positions due to not being considered suitable.  

I don't understand how, on the one hand, the health-related information provided by the mass-market testing companies can be considered not reliable for making medical decisions (as their websites state), yet still be considered the basis for insurance or military decisions.

Comments

The ABC article was a little more clear: when you reinlist you have to disclose any medical conditions or suspected medical conditions.  If your test says you're likely to get cancer you have to disclose this and you might be barred from reinlistment.

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It's more than covert operations personnel.  The DoD is concerned that anyone who works on defense or intelligence programs, whether they are military, civilian, or contractor, would be a person of interest to certain foreign governments.  When there are hostage taking events (such as hijackings) or kidnappings that put random individuals in the clutches of bad guys, if the captors discover that they hit it lucky and one of their captives has value as a commodity of interest to certain foreign governments that are unfriendly to the United States, then that person is suddenly at much greater risk than another innocent hostage.  Any secure information stored in the person's head is also a risk of becoming exposed, which may be the DoD's main concern, of course.

I do think it's a bit of a stretch to imagine these bad guys running DNA tests on their victims to discover if any of them have this type of added value, but the DoD security regulations often seemed over the top when I had to live by their rules.  I remember once passing a couple of security officers in the hallway and we greeted each other in passing.  A few seconds later, I turned my head, half expecting to catch one of them making a telephone call about their encounter with me on his shoe.

EDITED:  Another incident I remember is that they insisted that I remove a sign I had posted in my office that said "The secrecy of my job prevents me from knowing what I'm doing".  They said they didn't want anyone to know what kind of work goes on in here.  The "in here" was a secure area requiring all kinds of checks to get into it in the first place.

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Gaile, just wait until we get a little bit closer to actually using DNA as a data storage medium.    Really. Been done already, and is routinely--if in a very limited way--being used via DNA barcoding not just in the biological sciences, but in fields like chemical engineering and nanotechnology.

We've made leaps and bounds the past couple of years in speeding up the "data read" capability with things like better long-read and nanopore sequencing, and the "data write" viability of things with tools like CRISPR. Microsoft and others, like Twist Bioscience, are actively working on technologies for DNA data storage.

DNA is a super-dense storage medium with a Base-4 radix--four nucleic acids--at a storage level per bit the literal size of a molecule. Puts our current digital storage media to shame...except we will (maybe?) never be able to write to and read from it real-time. But think of it as an Amazon S3 Glacier storage class. If you don't need rapid read and write, just handy, tiny-footprint, EMP-proof, covert storage and transport...

Heck, in 2017 or 2018 George Church at Harvard encoded a lowly E. coli bacterium's DNA with a photograph of a human hand, and was then able to decode and reproduce the image. If I were a science fiction or Clancy-like espionage writer, I could have a field day with this stuff. 

Has nothing to do with the original topic, but I'll betcha someone at Rand or another think-tank has already perked Pentagon ears with talk of DNA data storage. And with Gaile mentioning her work at the NS-...er, ah, at a DoD affiliated supplier/provider, just thought I might never get another chance to mention DNA data storage here on G2G...  

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Gaile, you make some good points but the reasons given by the DOD don't really match with the tests they're warning about: most health-based DNA tests are private and accessed only by password whereas genealogy-based DNA tests are often open to the public.  Yet the DOD makes no warning of these tests.

The whole premise of their concern doesn't seem logical to me.

Edit to add: I can't help but wonder if the staff who passed this memo don't really understand the whole DNA testing industry and publicly available databases and that this memo (as many are in the military) is misguided and knee-jerk rather than well researched before publishing.

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I'm wondering why such a memo would be sent out now considering the same implications existed years ago.

Answer 4

Note to self: use the customer name "John Smith" when seeking medical information via over-the-counter DNA tests...

Comments

But why do it at all when it's not reliable?

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Why do people buy $150 insurance for a $300 phone with a $150 deductible?

I'm sure that a salesman was implemented at some point...

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I don't!

Answer 5

As a former Sergeant in the Army my first reaction to this was that a new 2nd Lieutenant working in a staff office read something somewhere and decided to send out a memo, which set off a military intelligence firestorm. Military intelligence is one of the truest oxymorons in existence, and new 2nd Lieutenants seem to have a knack for setting them off.  

Any risk to soldiers from direct to consumer (DTC) DNA tests would be very, if not extremely, low, and I doubt that the major powers would waste their time trying to weaponize the data. I don't know if the non-major powers would have the means to weaponize the DNA databases financially or scientifically, but I tend to doubt it.

Comments

Note that the memo was co-signed by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, so I don't think your theory that we can pin this one on a new 2nd Lieutenant will fly.

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Making jokes about 2nd Lieutenants is kinda traditional Dennis. I hoped the winking smiley face would indicate that  that part of my answer shouldn't be taken too seriously. My opinion about the level of risk was serious on the other hand.

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3 most dangerous things in the Army:

* Captain with a plan

* Lieutenant with a map

* A sergeant who just said, "Let's see what this baby can do."

When I had some time to work with the 4th Infantry Division, their unit patch is 4 ivy leaves (Roman IV being an acronym for ivy):

The running joke with the enlisted and sergeants would be to point at the patch and say, "What's this?  Four lieutenants pointing north."

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Ah, SJ. We really need to be able to upvote comments.  

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Thanks. Your comment is the only upvote I need 

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Thanks for providing examples SJ. I'd heard the first three, but the patch was a new one for me.