&quot;But it&#x27;s not completely implausible that this really was the decision of a few individual employees.&quot;<p>Oh, I fully believe it was the decision of a few individual employees. I just don&#x27;t believe those individuals were the actual coders. Coders will code to the spec they are given; problems are far more likely to lie in the spec layer.<p>It is possible it will turn out the coders should have known better. But it isn&#x27;t even that hard for me to create plausible circumstances in which the coders didn&#x27;t have any reason to believe they were doing anything wrong. Remember, we&#x27;re only seeing the end-results, but it&#x27;s not hard to imagine a combination of specifications where the programmers are assured each little step is legal and OK, and a combination of other optimizations combining together to produce this result, with no one person quite understanding the interactions.<p>And just to be clear, I work a lot in security, on the defense side. I&#x27;m familiar with taking the possibility that coders will be actively hostile seriously. But I&#x27;m also very familiar with seeing five intelligent people each acting according to their own best info and with their own best interests at heart interacting to produce blithering stupidity. It&#x27;s not always as simple as it looks when you&#x27;re just looking at the outcome.