If you can make money from it, there will always be someone willing to do it. And/or there is always someone you can compel to do it. It sucks but you pretty much have to operate with that assumption for most things.

One man's "affront to fundamental individual freedoms" is another's "essential for the collective good".

The excuse is you are good at tech and there's a gun to your head.

There's a sort of mirror world of academic research happening, where on one side of the mirror, you have people building the tools to censor the internet (typically but not always in Asian venues), and on the other, the tools to circumvent that censorship (typically but not always in Western venues). I know far more people on the latter half of the equation, but have enough exposure to the other side of the mirror to know that most of them earnestly believe they're doing something good. They see massive megacorportaions pushing American interests as an unfair lever in a fight for national sovereignty, and what they do as simply leveling the playing field, and combating misinformation. While I would wholeheartedly agree that they are mistaken in their analysis (reifying systems for people, "The institution I'm supporting may sometimes do bad things, but what I do is supporting the good parts!") and should immediately stop, I wouldn't want to dehumanize them any more than I would someone who works for Palantir, or even Google, Amazon, etc.

I doubt we disagree on ethics here, but I am empathetic to the influences at play for a developer in that situation. I would not demonize them without first knowing more.

"Failed", hah. If you fail, you never even touch stuff like that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao

As fucked up as it is, the virtue of individualism is often studied as a capitalist/western phenomenon that causes crime and internal conflict. Many of the people building this likely genuinely believe that they are working for the greater good and repressing a harmful social underclass.