Ask HN: Can we talk about this now?
The understanding came to me while pondering Imgur's business model. The only ethical problem I have is the abstraction placed over the public's expectations of neutrality in national projects. With how money is managed in times when people expect to fight for survival it becomes too easy to overlook what we are fighting for.
But, something more distressing is going on as a result of the necessary misdirection and resource constrain. Those who voiced their opinion by applying their gifts in civilian social networking enterprises instead of military intelligence are suffering from diffusion of effort as their projects are being dual-used for the intelligence effort. Work meant to bring people together was re-fashioned into something that drives them apart until strife brings them to the edge of disaster. It is an old story. Once the engineers realize that their plowshares were swords, they will be disillusioned. The population is facing deinstitutionalization, which is the fever cramps that the Soviet block fell into when they realized they no longer had a system. This is a bad time for the system builders to be incapacitated by existential doubt.