This sort of thing pops up from time-to-time and I expect it to be somewhat more common that it is reported. Having said that, what I found interesting was mor

This sort of thing pops up from time-to-time and I expect it to be somewhat more common that it is reported. Having said that, what I found interesting was more about such stories might have to say about the role of professional ethics for technologists: how really developed the thinking is and how mindful practitioners are about having a professional ethic. When we look at many areas in technology, we really are often times granting a significant amount of real power to individual technology practitioners within organizations (or even society in some cases). Take the guy in the story: my guess was he was a run-of-the-mill small organization sysadmin, probably not very senior as a professional, but with the power to stop all of the students from being able to work on their educations as normal. The kind of power we put into relatively low ranking/low experienced individuals because they are technologists more often than not far exceeds the power of any other kind of worker in an organization, save for CxOs. Also, there's a matter of managerial ethics in regard to managing staff and allowing these kinds of threats to exist (as others have pointed out). I don't know that I have the answers on how to bring a better consciousness of this sort of thing to the workplace, but I do find it interesting to think about (and do care about it myself as a professional in the field). Maybe technical interviews should have some discussion of how candidate think of their potential role from an ethical point of view. I do know some of the professional societies also address it for themselves (I'm an ACM member, and they're going through a Code of Ethics revision http://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/code-2018/ http://ethics.acm.org/code-of-ethics/code-2018/).