This is an extreme case and I hope most engineers would look at this and understand how awful & damaging it could be; but given our influence on the world nowadays (as a class, if not always as individuals) we really need to be much more aware of what we're doing and how it affects people.
Some of the greatest atrocities we will see in tech (and we will see them) in the coming century will be the result of combining things created with good intentions.
Not much we can do I’m afraid except endure.
That said, a lot of engineers actually are in the position to make demands. The chances of getting fired for saying "I'm not going to do that because it's wrong" are probably very low. Most managers would rather not feel bad, and hiring someone new is usually touted as being a pain in the ass.
There may be some very good reasons that I haven’t thought of not to support this ethics idea. But putting food on the table shouldn’t be it because this one reason applies to any activity that could ever put food on the table, no matter how illegal, immoral, etc.
Is creating face recognition software unethical? Your answer is not really important, just the fact that different people will classify this differently. I thought it was creepy as f* when facebook started wanting to automatically tag people in photos. But if that's all the tech was for it may well be ethical, if creepy to some. And yet, face recognition is really all that was used in this case - matching up porn images with social media ones.
But I was thinking more at FAANG for example. They could be required to hire “certified ethical” engineers at least on sensitive projects at first. This means that even if the code is out there no coder would implement it in the company’s solution without risking losing the “certification” and the job. Anyone working for the Hacking Team (those guys selling exploits to oppressive governments) should be more or less unhireable especially if all code in a company’s portfolio should be traceable to a specific engineer.
The principle is already in place for other fields. Journalism being the closest probably. It could be made more effective if needed. It’s obvious that something is needed in this direction.
Another scenario: a neo-Nazi protest rally occurs, and counter-protesters use this tool to determine who the Nazis are, in order to publicly shame them. Is this OK? Again, the Nazis have not consented to the use of their images to shame or "out" them.
You could go on and on... a vigilant neighbor filming a "porch pirate" stealing packages... someone filming people leaving a gay bar, an abortion clinic, a "massage parlor". Someone constantly running red lights. Who decides what is shaming vs what is "protecting people"?
If a mechanical engineer creates some evil weapon, say a gun that shoots frozen mercury slugs (just to make up a ridiculous example), we don’t really have to worry about the proliferation of cryogenic weapons. When a software engineer pushes some questionable program’s source to github it’s game over.