I do believe that Snowden was a highly intelligent fellow. I don't remember him having a specific profession though that required and taught a strong ethics code. I am sure that the NSA hopes to never hire anyone like Snowden again, but how to achieve that kind of certainty is interesting.
Depending on who you ask, Snowden
was either a systems administrator (says NSA), or an "infrastructure analyst," which is a roundabout way of saying professional hacker (says Snowden). These two roles would teach significantly different definitions of "ethical."
As a systems engineer I can say that ethical teaching is a BIG thing in this career. It's primarily left to the individual businesses to teach, but this is one place where the businesses find it very worthwhile to invest in some training, on account of it's your IT people who have the keys to the kingdom to do whatever harm to your business they see fit. Regardless of how you feel on whether he was justified in his actions or not, Snowden is a good illustration of the kinds of harm an IT insider can inflict on an organization. It just illustrates one kind of harm, though.
I say "was" in the first sentence because, assuming that he experiences his personal best-case scenario of returning to the US and being exonerated in a trial, there's no chance he'll ever find like employment in a public agency or corporate environment, so his pool of likely future employers in his past role is extremely small. He will never be trusted around non-public personal information again.
Thank you to the poster who reminded me that Wall Street does not act alone and that in fact Washington, D.C. and Main Street are also players in any scenario.
Washington DC is a direct subsidiary of Wall Street, so it's hard to say where one ends and the other begins.
Main Street is for bread and circuses. Wall Street provides the former, and Washington provides the latter.
