Government is Remiss to Enforce Ethical Behavior

In the digital marketing world, ethical Internet practices are called white hat; unethical practices - black hat. The latter is professionally frowned upon and even though the digital landscape is becoming especially limited to bad form, a black hat association can cost an agency its credibility.

Similarly, if a government agency hires black hat technocrats to tap into the top-secret databases of foreign countries, then said organization is unethical for deliberately hiring and harboring unethical employees. In fact, they seem to admit it. 

There is of course a 21st century Cold War in which diplomacy struggles via the Internet and so the NSA is perhaps a necessary evil. That their tactics involve surveillance and espionage is by and large pardoned in the scope of political realism. But their appetite for big data makes them - by the human resources definition - an unethical organization.

Conversely, big data doesn’t have a code of ethics - no rules, no regulations, no referees. Google has an informal motto, “don’t be evil,” that leaves a lot of headroom. Organizations like the NSA use this headroom as leverage in Realpolitik. To install ethics would be negligent.