That the US gathers information about the foreigners it deals with isn’t surprising, but as Spencer Ackerman points out WikiLeaked information about US government interest in acquiring DNA samples of sundry foreign officials is a bit harder to explain.
The problem here is that Ackerman’s not a Star Trek fan. If he were, he would clearly recognize this as inspired by the Dominion’s plan to infiltrate the Alpha Quadrant by replacing key leaders with shapeshifter impersonators. We obviously don’t have access to shapeshifters, so the only path available to us is going to be cloning replacement leaders. By blowing the whistle on this program, WikiLeaks is in effect operating as a force multiplier. Now foreign governments are set to be wracked by fear and paranoia about possible clone-replacement without us needing to go through the difficult steps of actually growing the clones. After all, given America’s deficiencies in foreign language instruction, all the cloning in the world isn’t going to let us create tolerable copies — the best we can do is spread fear of copies.