I don't know if you are right or wrong, but your statement sounds to me almost exactly like the one that I hear from religious zealots about atheists: "No one to answer to, therefore, no morals or ethics".

There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, everyone is free to choose their own; It's a question of what likelihood you assign a-priori for ethics and morals to be chosen, and a question of empirical data as well, which likely no one has, so no statement can be disproved and everything is "equally right". (Was this paragraph about spies or about atheists?)

And I took "they" in the GP post to mean "the people who work for the NSA" although it possibly refers to the NSA itself - in which case, it is also true of any large corporation -- composed of thousands of people with their own agenda, no morals and very little to check what's going on in many respects -- see, e.g. pharma pricing.

In any case the major point I was trying to make is that spy agencies have side gigs that are so attractive to the governments that the spy agencies will keep their position, even if they don't do their main job well.

Everyone has some moral instincts (social animals and all that) but those can be overridden with right incentives.

Which is not far from true.

Morals one makes for themselves ("personal moral code") are not morals proper. They could just as well include that's its ok to kill kittens for fun (to give a silly example) -- that they don't is mostly thanks to their idiosyncrasy.

>There is a point of view from which this makes sense: Since there is no standard code, everyone is free to choose their own;

Ha, haven't read your second paragraph while replying to the first, but basically, yes, this.

Externally enforced behavior is not "morals".

That's a new definition then, because for millennia morals were derived from exactly those "externally enforced behaviours": from religion, society, culture, etc.

The personal codes someones makes on their own can be anything and everything ("shit on everybody to get rich" is a perfectly valid code that millions use). Nobody would call that "moral" though -- because precisely morals are those beyond the individual whims (though whether an individual follows them its their choice).

Personal principles someone follows are only fit to be called morals if they follow an extended, external, moral code. Which might change over time, and be culture-specific, but it's not "whatever I say".

We can't really experiment with humans, but the few experiments that have cleared ethical committees, it appears that babies as young as 6 months have a sense of equality and justice, see e.g. [0]

[0] http://www.wired.co.uk/article/babies-understand-hero-action...

So what _are_ "morals proper"?

I'm not following the link between "you don't need standards/reviews" and "your work ethic must not be very high" -- could you elaborate, please? Or was this a typo?

Standards are a set of procedures to cooperate and provide a certain level of minimum quality. For many single person hackers not having standards may result in much better quality, but for teams of people who do this because they need to pay rent the quality is always pointed towards the possible minimum, not maximum. Therefore standards usually improve the work of paid teams.

But standards aren't followed per se. Only when your activities are logged and public do you even try (you=normal human being working a day job). But only when ass-kicking or termination of regular payment is feared do people really care about the details. And these usually come from reviews.

So if you have neither standards, nor public exposure (forgot that one), nor reviews your team's quality is probably low.

But none of that is true for the NSA.