Justices Allow Police to Take DNA Samples After Arrests

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13. Scalia even attacks finger printing of non-criminals, i.e. on driver's licenses.

The Court asserts that the taking of fingerprints was “constitutional for generations prior to the introduction” of the FBI’s rapid computer-matching system. Ante, at 22. This bold statement is bereft of citation to authority because there is none for it. The “great expansion in fingerprinting came before the modern era of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence,” and so we were never asked to decide the legitimacy of the practice. United States v. Kincade, 379 F. 3d 813, 874 (CA9 2004) (Kozinski, J., dissenting).

As fingerprint databases expanded from convicted criminals, to arrestees, to civil servants, to immigrants,
to everyone with a driver’s license, Americans simply “became accustomed to having our fingerprints on file
in some government database.” Ibid. But it is wrong to suggest that this was uncontroversial at the time, or
that this Court blessed universal fingerprinting for “generations” before it was possible to use it effectively for identification