Professional ethics generally apply to representing the interest of your clients, not their victims. Engineering ethics and professional licensure don't discour

Professional ethics generally apply to representing the interest of your clients, not their victims. Engineering ethics and professional licensure don't discourage creating new weapons systems (eg armed drones) or more unnecessary prisons. Which means that for the main problem we're facing - big tech surveillance panopticon - widely understood engineering ethics has basically nothing to say! I wish this were different, but it's not. There's also the practical problem that this software wasn't even produced in the US. So then also ban the importation of any software that wasn't produced under a similar regime? So no, the idea that licensing software engineers could correct the problems of our industry seems wholly untenable and ultimately from the same broken-political vein of finding some fall guy to blame rather than directly regulating the behavior of malevolent companies.