Using your powers to acquire sensitive information in order to blackmail political opponents is certainly nothing new - just ask J. Edgar Hoover.
It almost seems like posts like yours–something tptacek is perhaps the master of–are saying, perhaps subtly or even inadvertently, "this evil is not new, and therefore you should not oppose it".
My take is this: just because some humans who were born before me were unable to recognize, or if they were, oppose, a particular bad thing makes no difference whatsoever. There is no statute of limitations on opposing evil and doing good. Wrongs can—and should—be corrected no matter how much time has passed since the discovery and the subsequent correction.
In the specific case of Hoover, the public did react. When Hoover died, ending decades of quiet terror, his 3rd in command was passed over for promotion to the top job. In retaliation he started leaking a lot of dirty laundry to the press, which caused a huge reaction that ultimately ended with the resignation of the president, huge shakeups of all spy agencies, and a giant crack in faith from which we've yet to recover.
One disgruntled spook with a fistful of secrets paralyzed all "four" branches of the government of the most powerful country in the world for over a year.
While I can't speak for Sharlin or tptacek, when I point out that things have happened before, my intent is to prompt people to stop being merely outraged. It is all very nice to say that wrongs should be corrected, but it is entirely useless to waste that outrage on complaining at a local watering hole.
Articles and comments like this have, at best, some vague hope that Congresspersons will notice and wish to pander to those particular constituents by authoring a bill. What kind of lackluster plan is that? Near as I can tell, most people are outraged because it makes them feel like they are similar to the other outraged persons and, action proving truth more than word, entirely disinterested in changing the status quo.
Slavoj Zizek seems to mention this issue in some form or other quite often. He argues, as far as I understand, that a big difference between 'us' and previous generations is that we seem to both disapprove and accept the status quo to an unprecedented degree. I've also heard others claim that we are a 'silent generation' that just kind of tries to be different in the private sphere, and leave it at that.
I don't know if this is true, but I do know we often consider our situation unique when even a cursory look at history shows that it isn't.
I'm a liberal, which to me, includes being a meliorist. This means, roughly, that I believe that things get better, and that this is especially true over the long run. I think that the present day society is better than those in the past. So that's the context in which I say, "Yes, we can do something."
The silence of our generation comes, in part, from our multiculturality. Too many of "us" feel like we're irreconcilably different. Race, sex, industry, level of education, socioeconomic status, etc.: we see more ways in which we're different than in which we're the same. So we retreat behind facades of private domains, where the differences can be muted by not seeing them, and in a vicious cycle, reinforces our inability to come out into the public sphere and engage. We spend our days traveling from our private homes, along roadways where our interactions with others involve cursing and frustration, to private businesses, and so many of us need to be back home to sleep soon afterwards for another day of work. If your neighbor went on strike, would you even know or care?
I realize I didn't really answer the question, but I don't really have an answer.