The Biothreat Assessment as a Foundation for Biosecurity

Threat management as a system or theory, and practice, is rooted in the ability to systematically identify potential threats and mitigate the risks of these threats acting upon a particular asset. Threat assessment is not a snapshot in time but a living process to detect threats as early as possible to facilitate mitigation and management of them. As this chapter will discuss, the foundations of threat assessment and management as a body of expertise draws its history from law enforcement, security, and the behavioral sciences. The outputs of this history include a variety of tools, from behavioral analysis to discrete security protocols that continue to demonstrate their effectiveness in the related fields of investigations, security, defense, and personnel protection. Despite the significant differences between the assets in a traditional threat management perspective (e.g., human assets/targets) and the biosecurity perspective (e.g., biological agents, toxins, animals, technology, data) tenets of threat management can be effectively applied to the fields of biosecurity, if not underpin it. This chapter will explore the modification and adaptation of the threat management backbone tool, threat assessment, into a biosecurity specific tool. Effectively, this chapter will describe the resulting biothreat assessment process.