Eliminating – Not Reducing – Risk
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but elimination is even more valuable. If we learn from safety research over
the past 150 years, we realize that removing the danger is far more
effective than any other safeguard.
When we hear of a company mishandling data and divulging
private details, investigators may point fingers at a sloppy employee
or a deficient firewall. This assumes that truly safe workflows are a
fantasy. Everything is vulnerable, and if someone breaks your defenses, the fault lies not with your techniques but your choice to
skimp on defensive expenditures.
The reality differs. The techniques of Undisclosed DNA mean
that you never endure the Sisyphean task of protecting troves of
data. The headline stories of data breaches are not simply remote
possibilities – they are impossibilities.
I An Early Breakthrough in Safety
Railroad work posed grave dangers in the nineteenth century. Traditionally, as a new car would come close to a train that it sought
to join, the following ritual would connect the cars when they were
close to each other – and still in motion. Someone would stand outside of one car, lean over the gap, and drop in a pin where the hitch
of each car met. To separate the cars, someone would manually yank
out that pin. Injuries and fatalities occurred at an alarming rate.
Instead of labelling these incidents as mishaps or freak accidents, the locomotive world adopted a new coupling mechanism.
Even the most cold-hearted train operator saw that the newly
patented device would save on payouts and legal fines as well as the
costs of finding and training replacements.
The Janney coupler (also called the tightlock in Britain) revolutionized railway safety. Rail carriages could now automatically
lock themselves when they had a “knuckle” mechanism at the front
and back. The “knuckles” of two cars would gently bump into each
other. That action would cause a mechanism on each car to rotate
around its copy on the other car. Their movement would also cause
a locking pin to “pop” into place.
Trains still use this mechanism. The coupler never saw radical changes because the Janney design hit upon the greatest way
to reduce harm. It completely eliminated the dangerous elements
and moved people away from hazards. The worker of a railyard or
freight company no longer needed to stand between two giant cars.
Even more importantly, the sketchy operation of the lock-and-pin
mechanism completely vanished as did the chance of a missed link
that would cause two cars to bounce off of each other.
2 Hierarchy of Controls
In America, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and
Health states that the most effective measure to improve safety is
to physically remove the hazard. A step halfway down the hierarchy is to isolate people from the hazard. From a factory that makes
stamped metal signs, you cannot eliminate a machine that forcefully pounds the metal. You can, however, move the “on” button
away from the opening to the machine or make the machine inoperable unless you close some sort of safety gate. Least effective are
administrative controls and personal protection equipment (PPE).
Traffic engineering in North America usually languishes at the
bottom rungs of this safety ladder. Through settled areas, you will
find wide roadways with few obstacles. These de facto highways invite speeding and do nothing to physically stop an errant automobile. Worse still, houses and business will sit directly along this road
– and not on an “access road” or street that runs parallel but off to
the side.
Inevitably, some automobile careens out of its lane and slams
into a building. Local news will show photographs of a car or a
pickup truck in the middle of a bank, pharmacy, or house. Every
time this happens, we can say that this was a clear case of an intoxicated driver. If drink driving is not to blame, we just lambaste terrible driving skills and decry the current state of humanity. Even if
we could shame every driver into being a safe driver who is never
“reckless” (a feat that we cannot accomplish), we would have done
nothing to prevent the crash that happens when a driver has a medical emergency such as a heart attack.
Forward-thinking planners, however, will erect bollards. The
underlying reason for a crash or the ineptitude of the driver is irrelevant. The bollard is a barrier that makes it impossible for an errant
automobile to crash into an outdoor cafe. It would be ridiculous to
forgo the bollards and instead instruct diners to wear helmets and
body armor – just in case.
3 Security in the Tech Field
The world of data brokers, information services, and computing
have lagged in safety as well. A lack of mathematical know-how was
never the issue. A limited outlook did all the work.
In the beginning, passwords were absent or very simple and
never hashed. The various technologies we take for granted when
we shop online or send emails became common well after they were
technologically feasible. Internet security was an afterthought – every step of the way.
Still, many used their talents to improve things where they
could. Vigilant managers employed access controls and limited
which people could even see certain files or go into certain rooms.
Coding whizzes developed the best firewalls. They were, however,
still toiling away at the least effective levels of safety.
Unsurprisingly, you may have heard of one or another of the
massive data leaks in the modern age. One thousand credit card details lost here. Names and password of five hundred people divulged
there. After the commercial breaks, the reporting outlet may add
fuel to the panic fire.
When it comes to new technology, many companies want to
avoid the bad press, legal fines, and the loss of trust and future business. They invest money to hire more IT security staff, launch more
firewalls, and whatever else it takes – or so it seems.
We have let someone handle a gun. We hid the bullets and
handed out bulletproof vests to everyone in the neighborhood. On
the other hand, we could have made sure that guns are not accessible
to just anyone.
4 Getting There ... for Some of Us
Thankfully, computer security has left the Dark Ages. Websites
now, almost universally, engage in encrypted conversations with
visitors’ computers. The conversations are end-to-end encrypted.
Only the direct participants can decipher the contents. No website
has a master key that unlocks every session. Each person who visits
a website creates and uses a unique key for every visit.
Zero-knowledge proofs underpin the technology behind signatures that we use to verify our interlocutors are not impostors and
credit card transactions. Asymmetric keys allow for conversations
with people who have never met – all without a middleman.
Despite these advances, the benefits have not gone out to everyone equally. Anyone who cares about friendships, commitments,
or fairness should take a look. Advancements in cryptography over
the past few decades have made a much more equitable landscape
for privacy.
Activists in the 1990s circumvented export embargoes on the
maths behind cryptography when they took the instructions and
code for Pretty Good Privacy (a form of end-to-end encryption for
email) and printed them in books and on T-shirts, which were protected by clauses on free speech.
Before that, computer security was the domain of militaries and
the rich elites. This resembled the security of a physical museum or
a gold vault. Valuable items had to be somewhere, and the measures
that protected them were expensive. Only governments and other
well-funded entities could install surveillance cameras, motion detectors, full-time security guards, and so on.
DNA information is still mired in this old paradigm. Even
worse, the lifting of a super-injunction in 2025 revealed a grave injustice. The UK accidentally divulged a list of the Afghanis who had
collaborated with the war against the Taliban. These people were essentially abandoned by the US, the UK, and NATO allies when the
Taliban reclaimed Afghanistan in 2021. The leaking of people’s information painted a target on the backs of every collaborator and
family member.
This revelation casts other acts of government in a new and unfavorable light. Parliament has stipulated the collection of DNA for
all newborns in the UK beginning in 2030. Now imagine the consequences of the UK maintaining the DNA – in full – for millions
of residents.
The goal of identifying genetic risk factors and finding correlations seems noble, but we can see many pitfalls with the planned
way to go about this. Attacks, hacking, phishing, incompetence,
and sheer accidents are not remote possibilities that anyone can prevent. Such incidents are inevitable. The damages will fall disproportionately on those least able to recover their secrecy, avoid discrimination, or financially survive any resulting fraud.
How much better it would be if we could prevent such catastrophes from ever occurring. Undisclosed DNA does just that.
5 Marrying Biology and Cryptography
Medical research, paternity tests, and police forensics as entire fields
have missed out on a truly glorious revolution in cryptography. We
seek to address that.
Because the sequencing of the genome and the storage of DNA
had been all or nothing, the issue has polarized people. They promote and defend genetic testing, tagging, and tracing, or else they
want to slam the brakes on every application in order to err on the
side of caution.
Those who submit their blood to 23 and Me or Ancestry DNA
to find genetic links can only be optimistic and hope their information stays confidential. Opponents fear the dangers of embracing
DNA-related tech.
Anyone who wants to seize on the opportunity to find a third
cousin who lives in Guatemala must also reconcile with the fact that some company will retain all of your DNA, maybe for an indefinite
period of time. Those who decry attempts to monitor our DNA
must also forgo the benefits of early diagnoses of disease or reuniting small children with parents after wars tear families apart.
Undisclosed DNA resolves the ethical dilemmas and reassures
the actors in this field. It obliterates the totalizing questions surrounding DNA. Headline stories such as the Afghan leaks become
impossible because we can link up the best tools in separate fields
of science.
One of the causes of the disaster at Jurassic Park – be it the book
or the film – was the narrow perspective of the DNA whizzes. The
threats they foresaw lay entirely within biology. They toiled while
oblivious to chaos theory. The line of “Life finds a way.” fell on
deaf ears. The scientists thought they would prevent unauthorized
breeding with a few tweaks to the sex chromosomes.Worst of all, no
one in charge had accounted for the possibility of a disgruntled employee who would deactivate certain safeguards as he tried to smuggle out entire embryos.
Imagine, however, that we attempted spectacular feats of engineering with a broader outlook. With Undisclosed DNA, we do
not sell you on a new patch here or an improvement there. We fundamentally rethink the processing of DNA by using methods that
have sat outside of biology. As a result, we will never witness the
hypothetical disasters or the very real dangers of something like the
Afghan leaks.
