But that lowers the deterrence factor. If you’ve got lethal drones that can target any individual you want then who needs war when you can establish a totalitarian state? Just eliminate all of your enemies with drones and use them to keep the population firmly under your heel.

I think that this is a great point. It's also a little scary when you think about the data sets that exist out there for advertising. Any way that someone targets an ad could be the selection criteria for these efficient wars.

My next thought is that programmers do have an opportunity to take moral stands against some of these things. We can't stop someone somewhere from building these terrible things but we might be able to make it harder by preventing huge problematic privacy invading data sets from existing.

If "winning" is what you care about.