>> The average government worker has no qualifications or capability to determine what is or isn't legal. >> Sorry to godwinize, but that's the Nuremberg defen

>> The average government worker has no qualifications or capability to determine what is or isn't legal. >> Sorry to godwinize, but that's the Nuremberg defense in a nutshell. The reason that the Nuremberg defense isn't a valid defense is because the acts that were being committed were so clearly without question grossly unconscionable. Demanding that every member of the intelligence community constitutionally examine the project they're working on is a ridiculous demand. Most of them literally lack the mental tooling to do so. I don't mean they're stupid, I mean that they would first need to go read up on all the relevant case law and legal theory. While it would certainly be personally fulfilling for many of them and raise the level of discussion with regards to the legality of certain programs, I hardly think you can consider that a reasonable requirement. Additionally I don't think you can call most surveillance programs so ethically deranged on their face that any reasonably good but casually constructed set of ethics demands non-participation.