In a post-COVID world, startup investing has grown beyond meeting in Silicon Valley coffee shops to speak business with recent projects. This implies investors are expanding their horizons to put in writing checks across borders.

As investments grow globally, there’s still a priority stateside for security and ensuring the U.S. protects its businesses, meaning it must monitor foreign inflows while still promoting innovation. “In our mandate, national security isn’t specifically defined because in some ways it’s an evolving concept,” Paul Rosen, assistant secretary of the treasury for investment security, said at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023.

As technological developments change, so does Rosen’s position.

For instance, consider data and sensitive personal information, that are hot topics for each average Americans wanting to retain privacy and large corporations wanting to realize information on users.

Data is ubiquitous and at any time when an organization is developing recent strategies, there’s an enormous reliance on it, Rosen said. “Considered one of the things that we take into consideration is, well, what’s the chance to national security if troves of knowledge — whether it’s personal information [or] data around IP or others — get into the mistaken hands?”