Bioveillance: A Techno-security Infrastructure to Preempt the Dangers of Informationalised Biology

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 2011, a number of controversial experiments were conducted on the H5N1 flu virus. While the experiments illuminated growing biosecurity concerns regarding gain-of-function research, the controversy also signaled an evolving biosecurity threat landscape in which biological information, understood to be a latent and potential form of biological life, and the digital infrastructures that circulate this information, have also come to be seen as dangerous. This new threat landscape is informed by the technological framing of biological life as code. What kinds of biosecurity practices are called for when biological life is understood as code and what are the implications for life itself of developing such security practices? The United States has developed a techno-security infrastructure, which this article calls ‘bioveillance,’ in response to the dangers of mobile and mutable biological information. Collapsing biosecurity and cybersecurity into the emerging field of cyberbiosecurity and mirroring the networked life forms that it intends to prevent from proliferating, bioveillance is a vital component in a burgeoning global techno-security culture. The fact that biological life is not a code or information in any strict sense means that bioveillance will face significant challenges in its implementation not least because by using digital technologies to manage the communicability of informationalised biology, bioveillance also produces and proliferates that which it aims to forestall. This means that the more U.S. institutions do to generate biological information for biosecurity purposes, the more bioinsecurities they risk producing. Bioveillance and biological danger become one in the same.