Their recommendation is for active military members. It comes around the holidays, when family might give a military member one as a gift.
Military members are required to disclose medical problems, since they aren’t covered by the same labor laws as civilians, and these recreational genetic testing kits could provide inaccurate information. This could put the military members in a tricky situation and result in ruined careers.
The Pentagon recommends that military members contact a licensed professional for genetic testing, instead of the at-home kits.
The warnings have been received with their fair share of scrutiny. Conspiracy theorists wonder if there could be a genetic surveillance situation. If a large surveillance state ever got hold of the information it could be used to persecute a specific ethnic group.
Plus, genetic information could always be stolen, or sold on the black market.
This information could be turned into a series of thriller with little effort. First, a military member is murdered, then in the hunt for the killer it could turn out that there have been a string of eliminations of people who recently took an at-home genetic test. The data could be tracked, and the upload stopped at the final second.
In the second book, a copy of the data has survived and turned up sold to the highest bidder. It turns out to be a group based in the United States, and the protagonist is forced to infiltrate the group and find out about where the data went.
But, in a Fast and the Furious style twist, the group who bought the data live by a code of ethics, and they are using the data to flush out an international organization.
Book three could be the exchange, book four could be a new technology which takes samples of DNA from unknowing soldiers and sequences them, and book five could be a bigger, badder bad guy, maybe even the original government.
The problem with series like this is the requirement for the antagonist to become more and more evil with each book. Nobody cares if the hero goes from saving the world from a rogue secret agent to stopping the neighbor from throwing her trash into the wrong trash can. That’s why the Fast & the Furious movies are starting to get ridiculous, but as long as tickets continue to sell who cares?
