I wonder how much of this news has resulted in an entirely new cohort of software engineers applying for jobs with these companies? I'd bet the HR departments at places like Booz are extra busy right now.
Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I learned a ton in that area.
I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start implementing them yourself.
Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important.
I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption, anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Even if only a minority of developers are receptive to working on such systems (and I don't think that, outside the West Coast/Bay Area/Startup/HN bubble, these people are actually a minority. I suspect that we are actually the ones that are outnumbered), that minority suddenly being made to think about these companies has probably given them a boost.