What I think happened
I’ve always known that sooner or later, the day would come where I would have to make a leap in the project because there would be some canon hole that I couldn’t directly fill with citations. One day, I would have to write a section based on circumstantial evidence and those hard to explain “gut feelings” (by which I mean something far more than a “hunch”).
Here’s what I’ve got:
1. We know the Corps is already involved in EarthGov’s plan to roll out the “mind wipe” machines, because they’re writing into law that special court telepaths have to conduct “before and after” scans on prisoners sentenced to it. That means the director (Johnston) is well on-board with this.
2. We know that Johnston hates telepaths, killed most of the leadership of the Corps and many cadre primers, and later sold telepath prisoners to the Shadows as “weapons parts”. He is one of the biggest baddies in a batch of Big Baddies.
3. We know that normal defendants and prisoners have rights (like a trial, for one) while telepaths have none. And since Johnston, as the (mundane) director of the Corps (appointed for life) can have anyone killed for any reason or none at all, telepaths only get whatever “rights” he wants them to have, which basically means “nothing”. That’s how he can sell people to the Shadows and no one back on Earth (who isn’t closely involved) even knows about it.
4. We also know the senators who oversee the Corps are chummy with Johnston, and that this oversight committee grew out of the Committee on Technology and Privacy.
5. Ergo, who is overseeing (or at least involved in) the development and roll-out of this “mind wipe” device? This same committee.
6. And since normals have rights, it would make so much more sense for this device to be tested on telepath prisoners. No one would even know or care that EarthGov did this to them - if no one even cares when law-abiding telepaths are killed, no one’s going to care what happens to these people. If this technology didn’t drop out of the sky from the aliens, it had to be tested on people, and who else?
7. Then, if telepaths object to being part of this - to torturing their own people - hey, we just kill them, too! (And they do object, and do get killed until the survivors are terrorized into obedience, as with the Shadow conspiracy.)
8. And then the EA Senate can bill this new device as “humanitarian”! and get all the credit for being “civilized”!
9. Meanwhile, we continue to show how evil Johnston is, and foreshadow what he does to telepath prisoners later.
Amirite?