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As Donald Trump’s return to the White House looms, dismantling the most dangerous weapons in the arsenal of executive power should be the Biden administration’s highest priority for its last days. The most obvious of these relate to the president’s war-making powers, particularly authority over nuclear deployment. But there is another apparatus of coercion that will be at Trump’s fingertips, one which has been neglected in the conversation about what a fully realized authoritarian regime might look like in the United States: the vast national digital surveillance infrastructure and, most crucially, its broad and continually expanding genetic surveillance capabilities.
Last May, my organization, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law, published Raiding the Genome, a new report exposing the massive DNA collection program being run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We found that over the last four years, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) took DNA from over 1.5 million people. This is nearly 50 times the number of samples they collected in all preceding years combined, an increase...