The whole thing with Snowden has me thinking some of when I was just out of school. For freaky reasons, I stayed in NYC and took a job with Moody's Investors Service as a programmer and assistant database administrator. I was 22. I was amazed that I could get a good paycheck (though certainly modest by Wall St standards) for very little actual work. Then it hit me: They were not paying me for what I was doing, they were in effect paying me for what I wasn't doing: Using my time and energy to change the world.
When I quit, after about a year there, my boss immediately frantically checked all the passwords on the major administrator accounts, I had access all of them (this was on the News and Manual side of the company, not the more glamorous rating division, which was part of a general hiring freeze in the wake of the '87 crash) and I could have wrecked havoc with their systems in ways brazen or subtle if I wanted to. (The password for one of the root administrator accounts was "mandarin" and a sequence of numbers, as in American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky -- my boss had set the password, not me, and he hilariously had misspelled "mandarin".)
After I left Moody's I came across a book, which I can't find any reference to now, that documented how various people had worked to undermine the companies they worked for after growing frustrated with the lack of ethics or corruption by the bosses. It's a perennial problem with too few ways for people to respond.
