Using Biotechnology to Build a Workforce for Intelligence and Counterintelligence

摘要

From intelligence and counterintelligence, national defense, or economical perspectives, maintaining a status quo between the intelligence community and biotechnology is not a viable solution. Governmental decision makers should be made aware to the strategic relevance of biotechnology-related challenges and to the importance of increasing the contacts between the intelligence and biotechnology communities, to increase mutual knowledge, understanding, and maybe more importantly, mutual trust. These contacts should go much further than just polite interactions across disciplinary fields-it should become a priority for all to maintain economical competitiveness from a geostrategic perspective. In a globalized world where information is getting simultaneously more numerous and more available, control and accessibility of information is a key to strategic power. In a post-interdisciplinary dynamic, the optimal analysis of information requires interoperability: interoperability of the data, of the services, and the expertise. The importance of interoperability is obvious in a digitalized context, as it represents the first step for big data and artificial intelligence (AI) protocols to make meaningful information emerge from large-and constantly growing-datasets. On the other end of the spectrum, interoperability and cross-understanding of the nature of the data will nurture the human-driven and human-supervised constant monitoring, qualitative analysis, and early identification of potential national security threats. Interoperability is thus a necessary step to move toward an optimal integration of information in a process that would encompass both conventional analysis strategies and emerging tools such as bid data or AI. To be actualized, interoperability requires a universal language. Building a human capacity of experts sharing the language of fields as distant as intelligence and biotechnology, yet highly complementary in a globalized strategic vision will be the first and necessary prerequisite for this actualization to take place.