If the armchair-ethicist standard is: "if you have any qualms, you'll quit" – then the type of people doing recruiting, and being recruited, and staying in the agency, all become even more self-selected for total devotion to total surveillance than may already exist. Whatever oversight or shame might remain as an internal check would decay. Whatever hints/leaks we get would dry up even further.
That isn't necessarily any better of a result for us. It doesn't necessarily bring reform/correction any sooner.
I'd like to think the no-fly-zoning of Bolivia's president is an example of that sort of thinking exposing itself for public embarrassment/criticism. Here's hoping they keep digging their own hole deeper and deeper.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/11/197...
http://www.parsarts.com/2010/11/29/tehran-wikileaks-1979-cab...
http://wikileaks.org/cable/1979/08/79TEHRAN8980.html
No wonder even Cyrus Vance couldn't save the State Dept. from becoming a giant noodly appendage after Carter.
I'm just saying the simplistic "you must quit if you have qualms" standard shouldn't have an automatic presumption of either effectiveness or righteousness.
This is especially true about an old, powerful, and sovereignty-claiming institution like the USG and its security organs. They are beyond easy influence through either simple boycotts or idealistic infiltrations, and you can't easily ignore them or wait-them-out.
You seem to be assuming that every person joining the NSA makes it worse, and that's not clear to me. In particular, a small, cohesive, monocultural institution will be more likely to commit abuses and more able to keep them secret.
So a good guy joins the NSA and tries to effect change. What happens? They tell him "no". If he refuses to carry out his job, they replace him and get somebody else. If he shuts up and works within the system and eventually reaches a position of real power, then refuses to abuse... the people with power over the NSA as a whole replace him and get somebody else.
