Alright, thank you so much for coming. Welcome to the greater SF area. We want to thank everyone for making the trip here. We're going to have a great three days, the two days here, and the one day at biocurious. We appreciate you guys coming, it's good to put names to email addresses, and the chatter that goes on across the world.

We have a lot of greater thinkers here, innovators here, and the local law enforcement communities. We hope to share our best practices, not just the international community, but some of the relevant issues.

I am Nathan Head, supervisory special agent with the FBI WMD Directorate in DC. I was an assistant coordinator in NY, and worked with the Genspace group in NYC and building a relationship with them. I welcome you here, you've all seen names on the emails. Katie is out front, let either of us know if there are trouble. We havea packed day, we have lots of presentations to go through this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon. We need to keep those brief. There is a follow-on event at DTRA in this same room in Tuesday in the evening.

Let's go ahead and welcome everyone to the greater SF area, home to Biocurious, a great community lab. We have a slew of international attendees here, various countries, I won't go through every individual here and have you give an introduction. We'll hear from you this afternoon- Finland, Indonesia, Germany, France, the UK, Denmark, and various other countries as well as here in the US, a good slew of domestic attendees as well.

So, I've given my first set of welcoming remarks. I'll retrun it to the local WMD coordinator, Shawn Danahue, for a few remarks as well. Sean Donahue. Sean?

Craig Fair, FBI SF

Weclome to the conference. I am the local WMD coordinator for the SF division. I've been working with the biocurious folks in SV. Welcome to SF, you guys have a great time, the weather is fantastic. Take that short subway trip into SF. Hopefully the fog is staying away and you could see the golden gate bridge, and the restaurants and other things to see, if you have any questions, hit me up any time over the next few days and will be glad to give you adivce about where to go and not to go. I'd like to introduce my boss, assistant special agent Craig Fair. He oversees myself, and the whole Counterterrorism Division in the SF area.

Thanks Sean. And I'd like to welcome everyone, I was going to read the list of the international partenrs, but that has been taken care of. Thank you for coming here, from across the country and across the globe. This is a unique opportunity to get everyone in the same room together. This meeting represents the beuraue's efforts for outreah and to connecct with you. You need the opportunity to know the FBI from beyond the popular media, the guy in blue suits, they made me wear this, I have to wear this suit, and the other agents and personnel in this audience - this is a unique opportunity for you to get to know them.

I am one of the assistant special agents. SF is one of 56 field offices in the US. It's the 6th largest. It covers Carmell, the mid-point in CA, all the way to the Oregon boreder, so it's a rather large expanse of land. We have several hundred people committed to counterterrorism. This is not about counterterrorism, but it's about national security. We respond to many many events. I was at the US Open at the Olympic club yesterday. Late last week we had responded to an incident involving white powder which was sprinkled on the cutting green. The US govt had concern, and it was someone's ashes. Someone's father had passed away, and that was his final resting place. But regardless, the US govt chinned up the whoopey machine and here we go.

But the FBI's goal is to work with the amateur biology ommunity to safeguard science and those working in the field. We do not recognize the amateur biology community as a threat in any way. We view you as partners. The exercise of science should be available to everyone- equipment, materials, and knowledge that guideline the scope of scientific research. They must conduct themselves in a safe, responsible manner. This community should also be protected from nefarious actors, and the community must be a first-line defense against these actors, and the WMD coordinators can work with the community to deal with these people.

This event also educates the FBI about biology. It allows us to act as a conduit to local police and fire departments with respect to amateur biology activities. We've been engaged with DIYbio since 2009. We're here to keep this going. We also want to show the international community that this model is safeguarding your practice, and that's to our mutual benefit. This model works. Thank you for being here.

If you have an opportunity to make it over to SF, I encourage you to do so. Thank you very much.

Next we will have Joseph Jackson from Biocurious to give a few remarks.

Alright. Good morning everybody. I was going to say welcome to the heart of SV, but now we're in Walnut Creek. Welcome to Walnut Creek. I've not had a reason to be here, but whatever. This is a powell between FBI and diybio, dept of justice, etc., about the third that I have been to. About two years ago we were in DC, right after the Venter Institute had done the synthia - the first synthetic lifeform. We were upstairs, and they were downstairs, for that event. It was interesting to watch how fast this was progressing in the last two years. They're saying we're going to have another big announcement from JCVI, so we continue to push the accelerator on the pace of innovation in biotechnology.

I think these events perform a vital function, I think this is the first time that we've had all of these international delegates come together face to face, there was a congress of Jason Bobe, and folks ran that in London last year, to define a "code" of ethics. And then we had the version of that which we went to in June of last year in the US, and this is getting so much bigger, what is the future or the best way to keep conveining folks. I don't know what is going to happen next year, we might have to open up a bigger conference.

We have a packed three days ahead of us, so I will go ahead and sit down and get this session underway.

Alright, so as Joe said, we have a packed time here. I wanted to draw yourself to the packets that were handed out, just to go over a few things. We have the agenda, and with any govt initiative, there's an evaluation. There's a good use for that. I want to know what value is in this conference. This is our third conference, and associating between the FBI and DIY ocmmunity, we want to know what you find valuable and what you don't. We want to know how you would like to see these gatherings improve.

There's the WMD Directorate, in green. It talks about our mission and what it is we do. The other one is building relationships pamphlet, and that's about biological sciences outreach. We have another one about dual use research case studies, this is from AFS American Federation of Scientists-- this is about the research with dual use concerns. There's also an ICL report regarding synthetic biology and security aspects, and Howard Simon will be covering this tomorrow. The class notes, in that folder, we also have a Safeguarding Science card. These are the new cards.. pokemon is out the window, now we're on to bacteria and viruses. The box is quite large, for this small set of cards, there will be more cards with regards to these. This is an outreach tool tailored more towards the igem community and some of the amateur biology community to educate more about good/bad bacteria and viruses. We hear about anthrax and small pox, and there's some other positive effects as used in normal research. These were crafted wit hthe ASF. There are DIYbio stickers, there are lots of these available. We thank Mac and Jason for continuing to support this.

We have the next part of the session with two presentations, one from the FBI and one from Biocurious and Joseph. So here we were just a year ago, and now we're looking like this. This is very positive, yet it's way beyond our expectations of what we perceive this event would balloon into. Not only about what's happening between local law enforcement and FBI, and the amateur biology community in the US, but also to share this type of model with what we have been doing here, with our international partners to digest and to take this info, determine if this is right for you. We have worked with thsi community for the past few years, we feel like we have a great relationship, and we've moved from being a - it wasn't as trusting from both sides originally - but that's just how this relationship type works. We've come a long way from being the bad guys. We have a lot of advocates in this room, and we hope to deliver on our side.

So the goal of this gathering is to "foster the positive relationship among FBI, DIYbio, amateur biology, and local stakeholder communities to ensure safe conduct in science." We want to model this for the international community, we will talk about media outreach sessions, we will inform the diybio community about the role of law enforcement. This continues to be something that is talked about in the amateur biology community. We want to make sure that your community knows how we operate, and how the law enforcement communities operate. We want to make sure you know when things fall into our lane. We also want to recognize the advances in synthetic biology as well. We want you guys to talk and present what you're doing, this is a great opportunity for worldwide to put names to faces, to showcase what kind of work is being done.

So I'll first talk about the FBI and why we care about amateur biology. So, this was alluded to in the first comments. The FBI is a federal law enforcement agency, we have 36k employees, about 14k are special agents. They come with backgrounds in law, accounting, computers, and scientists. So I'm a PhD microbiologist, we have some other individuals that have advanced degrees in scientists. The bureau finds that valuable when trying to address specific issues to identifying ways in which we can conduct outreach, solve cases and conduct investigations. It's also valuable in preventive outreach. We investigate federal crimes, but since the 2001 anthrax attacks, we have moved from a reactive agency to a proactive agency. We have to take a proactive approach where we set things in place, identify things that are happening, and sensitive the community to the environment in which we live, and have different areas of the sciences, different areas of industry to understand how they could assist the FBI and preventing incidents from happening in the future. We not only conduct outreach with DIYbio, but also various other areas like nuclear power plants, chemical product producers, biology research, etc. We're doing this in the accounting world and computer world and so on.

In the United States, we have 56 field offices. 380 smaller offices that are affiliated with those offices. We have 60+ representatives at each agency that help do FBI/US matters in other countries. The WMD directorate, where I currently work, was setup in 2006 as a result of the WMD commission because of events in September 2001 and October 2001. It's a focus on tools of the trade. We recognize that there are people out there that want to cause harm to the US' interests. The tools that they use might be chemical, biological, or radiological or nuclear item. These could also take the form of explosives, which we see in Iraq and Afghanistan, which goes through our chemical area as well. We have a specific entity in the FBI that addresses these matters both reactively and pro-actively by trying to prevent these incidents. So the FBI is focusing on these WMD issues. There are 56 WMD coordinators. Sean is one representative of one office. There are some attendees from other field offices. They are the single point of contact for incidents, response, special event planning, local outreach to the CRM community. There's a few international representatives for INTERPOL, Singapore, and another one. They specifically handle WMD matters.

At FBI HQ, we have sections and units there that focus on other areas. WE have an operations section, they coordinate investigations and response. We have representative Keil Davis, from ops. He's present here. We have intel/analysis, Tony is here from WMD intel/analysis. We also have a countermeasures and preparedness section, which is where my unit falls. Our first mission is prevention. We talk with academia, postal, synbio, working with other local state and local and global entities and help sensitive them to current and emerging trends.

So speaking of the trend. We have this emerging trend. It's science. Amateur biology. It's coming as a result of this emerging technology that is available. The accessibility of said technology. And information via the internet and different connections made with individuals, as well as the interest. I'm a scientist at heart, I love science. I hesitate to think that there may be a tmie where, this type of innovativve capacity becomes the subject of such direction that it starts to bring questions to such a community. We take it very seriously to try to address safety and security not just from an FBI perspective, but also from amateur biology, to try to identify issues and help them reach their goals if we can.

Our interest is addressing the risks. There will always be interest in biologicals in WMDs. It has happened in the past due to state-sponsored programs that have taken on biologicals for potential offensive use. There will always be this power to use these items nefariously. We're interested in prohibiting the nefarious actor from doing what they do. We're not interested in silencing or stopping science. We're interested in stopping the trends on the negative side. We're here to support science. We're here to make sure that the feelings of amateur biology are met, and we're here to assist in that.

Our history started with igem collaboration in 2009. Since 2009, we've been sponsoring igem with regards to safe and responsible conduct in the igem world. We've owrked with igem in establishing criteria that involved responsible conduct of the science, and that's again, as a relationship is built with our amateur biology community, many of the members are here, with which we created relationships with that community as a result of our work with igem. So we started this interaction withDIYbio in 2009 in SF, in our "Building bridges around building genomes", and since we had various gatherings, including the one here today, to talk about the convergence of science and security.

And so, now it goes not only to the organizational level of DIYbio, but also the individual entities. Individuals here are creating relationships with local WMD coordinators, to understand the mutual benefit that ist here with safe and secure work. On the upper left hand corner, there are some FBI people with WMD backgrounds. These types of activities will happen later this week at biocurious, just like Genspace... trained nuclear scientist, giving testimony to.. with regards to outreach activity from us to amateur biology. Our efforts with amateur biology was televised, the texxt of which is available on the CSPAN site. My boss is the guy on the left, looking let and looking professional, you can only see my ear, I sat in a strategic position. it's about creating a relatinoship with the amateur biology community to address any specific threats that might happen.

We're showing up to the doors of amateur biologist, this was a story in The Scientist, about an agent that is still in our unit. A month ago, I made a visit to the Science Expo in DC, we see Olliver and other Genspace people like Ellen and Dan were there as well. This type of outreach, and the partnerships wthat we've made, are mutually beneficial, and you will hear the advocates talk about how the relationships were built, and how they hold as compared to a few years ago. And that pic is my attempt to streak FBI on the top, that's not a crown it was support to be a badge. It's been about 8 years since I streaked a plate, so..

CBRN. There have been articles about the rise of DIYbio and amateur biology and whether there are regulations. The last thing that we want to see is additional regulations, or preventing individuals from coducting science at home or in community labs. There's this push from our perspective to create relationships between the FBI and them to ccheck if there are issues coming up in the community, see if we can voice those concerns to a greater community, we speak on behalf of the FBI's efforts, and we are interested in communicating to a broader audience, not just CSPAN, but other international groups, of which we have representatives here that could adovcate for the amateur biology community. We're here to assist you. To create contacts with the local police or fire to sensitive them to what you're doing, being very proactive, all of that is very much up for discussion in the next two days.

We need your help to let us know where the science is going. We're interested in staying ahead of emerging trends, and making sure that we're identifying those areas where we can identify individuals in using this type of environment for negative purposes. We want to keep the positive purposes to continue doing what they're doing. I'd say that in 2009, and maybe still here now, they might think that this is all a huge cnospiracy, and there's tinfoil hats on, and that the FBI is here to hack into the community. The concern should be instead about articles like this, this was by Carl Zimmer, about the right of individuals to publish the items in which they wish to, this article, "Amateurs are the new fear to create mutant viruses." I know a few people in here were interviewed for this study, including myself, who gave good support for DIYbio and amateur biology, but a lot of that was removed to get into the article in liue of the H1N1 controversy recently. It's situations like this where we can be support to the amateur biology community, where the community becomes entered into this type of discussion, that a target is laid on a specific population of individuals interested in conducting science. We're here to support and address these concerns, not just our security issues panel, but also outreach issues as well.

Okay, so. That's from the FBI perspective. I'll now turn the table over to Joseph to talk a little more about biocurious matters in the amateur biology community.