Remember that they are just gaming this out. That is what they do, identify threats and discuss options. It would be profoundly negligent of the pentagon to ignore humanities greatest threat.
This is actually very important thing to consider.
I remember when there was a very interesting program to spray for 'the light brown apple moth' around the Bay Area some years ago. The 'problem' was dubious, the parties to contracted to perform the operation were interesting, and the contents of the spray were more interesting yet. Kind of a series of time release capsules engineered at nearly a nano scale. Between these things, I hypothesized that it was an experiment that was ready to be performed in a populated urban area. At the same time I argued to my friends that it the authorities would be remiss in
not performing such experiments. There are a wide variety of situations under which such technology would be a useful component of an arsenal. Some good and some bad.
All of this technology has the potential to be used for good and for bad things. The problem is that NOBODY has a crystal ball. Not the masses nor the leaderships who are commissioning the programs.
Ignoring the potential for mis-use of this technology is completely negligent. It is pretty close to a certainty that the technology will be attempted to be mis-used at some point in the future. For this reason it is imperative that coincident with development means of balancing out the new-found powers are also developed.
I, for one, have no real problem with the development of technologies of these types. It's going to happen. Period. Where I have a GIANT problem is in keeping them secret and spurring development along only the offensive track and not the defensive. The two (secrecy and development focus) are highly interrelated and extremely worrisome.
There are some arguments for keeping everything secret but they are somewhat lame in many cases. One is that our 'enemies' might be given a jump on development of their own efforts along similar lines. I hold that this is weak because if they do learn from us, their implementations will be more well understood by us.
Another argument that is especially relevant to the domestic surveillance is that it will tip off the targets and they will change there ways. This is weak for a variety of reasons. One is that it is a transient benefit. Those of us who've been paying attention and understood the technology already more-or-less knew about these programs before Snowden, and a Snowden was likely to come along at some point anyway. The long and the short of it is that most 'enemies' who are a
genuine threat would not gain much by the blanket (and leaky) secrecy and have already made the necessary adjustments. Indeed, it is possible to use the false sense of secrecy against the very systems that are operating under the assumption that the secrecy exists.
There is very little to be gained by excessive secrecy and a huge amount to be lost (from the perspective of those of us who don't want to see abuses of the systems.) As Senator Wyden says, if we don't make some changes in terms of how we do domestic surveillance, we will regret it
within our lifetimes. I strongly suspect that he is right about this both generally and in his timeframe.
While nobody knows for sure how some of these technologies will be used in a future which is not fully know, the dangers of abuse are obvious enough that it is reasonable to be suspicious of the motives of those at the top of the food-chain especially when they wrap everything in secrecy and outright lies. They simply do not want any checks and balances and thus impediments to further development and utilization of these dangerous technologies. It is perfectly rational to question why.
