That's the whole point of a professional code of ethics. If you want to protect people for behaving ethically, that's government's job (c.f. whistleblower laws

That's the whole point of a professional code of ethics. If you want to protect people for behaving ethically, that's government's job (c.f. whistleblower laws et. al.). This sits a layer down in the defense-in-depth stack. And the idea is that if there's a recognized code, and consensus on what constitutes a violation, that employers will conform because if they don't they'll risk not just one "activist" employee leaving but most of them, out of a shared sense of communal ethics. Would it work? No idea. My experience is that software people tend to be pretty squishy on matters of personal ethics.