I'm quite wary of blaming employees for the perceived faults of their employers. Too much of our economy depends on morally debatable activity for me to be comfortable tossing around the "what you do for a living is bad for America" line willy-nilly.
For example, here on HN people seem very cool with the advertising industry. But I remember in engineering school, the popular refrain was that advertisers and marketing people were leaches sucking out the marrow of American industry. Yet, lots of engineers now happily work for companies in bed with the advertising industry. If you work for Facebook, you work for a company that depends heavily on an industry (advertising) that exists mostly because of government granted monopolies (trademarks), and whose business model depends on getting teenagers (who aren't competent to enter into contracts and don't really understand the ramifications) to give away their personal information in order for advertisers to try and sell them things they don't need. I think you can make a credible argument that what Facebook and similar companies do is morally objectionable, and that "I'm just doing my job" is no excuse for people who work in Silicon Valley figuring out how to maximally exploit these kids.
But I don't really want to go there (glass houses, etc). I think there is too much complexity in the underlying moral calculus for it to be reasonable to go there.
It looks like other people have already gone there; you're just pointing out that the viewpoint they have stated is not applicable just to the TSA. That seems like a valid observation to me.
For example, here on HN people seem very cool with the advertising industry. But I remember in engineering school, the popular refrain was that advertisers and marketing people were leaches sucking out the marrow of American industry. Yet, lots of engineers now happily work for companies in bed with the advertising industry. If you work for Facebook, you work for a company that depends heavily on an industry (advertising) that exists mostly because of government granted monopolies (trademarks), and whose business model depends on getting teenagers (who aren't competent to enter into contracts and don't really understand the ramifications) to give away their personal information in order for advertisers to try and sell them things they don't need. I think you can make a credible argument that what Facebook and similar companies do is morally objectionable, and that "I'm just doing my job" is no excuse for people who work in Silicon Valley figuring out how to maximally exploit these kids.
But I don't really want to go there (glass houses, etc). I think there is too much complexity in the underlying moral calculus for it to be reasonable to go there.