Schneier on Security's Journal

Protecting (and Collecting) the DNA of World Leaders

There's a lot of hype and hyperbole in this story, but here's the interesting bit:

According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touchedthey are later sanitized or destroyedin an effort to keep would be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service would neither confirm nor deny this practice, nor would it comment on any other aspect of this article.) And according to a 2010 release of secret cables by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the U.S. sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same.

The rest of the article is about individually targeted bioweapons.