Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, Wired's director of business and industry.

We're bringing you five stories that you need to know about this week, including the meteoric rise of the once-fringed far-right influencer Nick Fuentes.

He is breaking into the mainstream off of the back of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

I'm joined today by senior politics writer Jake LaHette.

Jake, welcome back to Uncanny Valley.

Hey, Zoe, great to be with you again.

So we're starting this week with some perhaps unsurprising, but still deeply, deeply concerning national security news.

According to a new analysis from Georgetown University, Customs and Border Patrol, CBP,

has spent the last four years collecting the DNA of at least 2,000 people, many of whom are

American citizens. They're uploading this information to CODES, which is the FBI's

nationwide investigation system that's been kind of the preeminent tool for violent crime

investigations for years. And experts say that the findings appear to point to the fact that the

data collection program is operating outside the confines of statute and without a lot of oversight.

I'm genuinely kind of surprised they don't have all of our DNA in some form already,

whether that's 23 and me or any of the other ways we could have been scraped all this time,

but it doesn't sound good.

Our colleague Del Cameron reported that, according to the findings, the 2000 total files include people who've actually never been formally charged with a crime and about 95 minors.

There were also dozens of cases where CBP agents left the charges field blank in the paperwork.

In other files analyzed by Georgetown officers invoked civil penalties

as the justification for taking the saliva swabs, which were how they were getting the DNA samples,

that federal law typically reserves for criminal arrests.

Ooh, and, you know, this is kind of a recurring theme with Dells reporting, but it's kind of hard

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