I agree, but with conditions. PEs have ethical responsibilities. If the engineers are licensed, yup, they absolutely have a moral and legal responsibility to re

I agree, but with conditions. PEs have ethical responsibilities. If the engineers are licensed, yup, they absolutely have a moral and legal responsibility to refuse to sign off on illegal work. In most states though, software engineers are not professionally licensed, certified, or ethically trained. Often they are referred to using demeaning terms such as "coders", which are equated as "bricklayers" by thought leaders such as Steve McConnell and others. Thus it would not necessarily be reasonable to hold them to a responsibility refuse to follow illegal orders they were given as mindless "bricklayers" and "coders" etc, which is the most common paradigm of software engineers. Unintelligent implementors who are simply typing things up on command with a surfeit of semicolons can not be held to any sort of professional responsibility. But PEs absolutely can and must.