&gt; <i>99% of software engineers decide to take enormously strong stands against surveillance even at great personnel cost, and surveillance continues on as if nothing happened, except maybe those who work on it get paid a bit more to make up for decreased supply.</i><p>Yup. And the magic of digital content, software being a kind of it - it&#x27;s infinitely copyable. It takes <i>one</i> guy to write a surveillance package and open-source it or have their company sell it, and <i>everyone</i> can now use it.<p>It&#x27;s not engineers who make the decision to use surveillance technology. Hell, for most of the work a software engineer does, most of the data coming from surveillance tech doesn&#x27;t even matter.