I read your entire argument. With its logic statements and your rambling about compilers and such. There are some assumptions you are making here:
1. Everyone who is "good at Computer Science" is automatically a logical person and is perfectly rational when it comes to everything they do in life. I am just going to point out the famous mathematician Ramanujan who was also intensely religious. Let us face it: Pure math is way harder than any computer science problem you are going to solve.
2. You are assuming that every single person who works for the NSA or has a sense of patriotism is necessarily a person whose ideology is influenced by Fox News.
Re: 1, I guess I use myself as an example of a technologist who is aware of the moral implications of his work. I don't deny that there are sellouts and such. A technologist in the next decade is free to choose the work that catches their fancy, and free to have moral objections to their work and leave for more satisfying work. I also believe that wholesale surveillance is on the wrong side of history, and in the long run, people who are free to choose will not support the surveillance state. Thus the surveillance state will get the dregs, plus or minus.
Re: 2, I'm actually responding to this point in the parent, which says the source of the next generation of NSA recruitment pool is: talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen. You may be able to see how I connected the dots to Fox News.
I will connect them further. Fox News has an aging viewership for many reasons. Watching talking heads, as a model of receiving information about the world, is on the way out. Fox has committed to ideologies that, for one reason or another, are not believed by young people. In parallel to the changes to work noted by Stross, there are changes to media consumption that are also driving younger generations farther from the baby boom culture.
1. Everyone who is "good at Computer Science" is automatically a logical person and is perfectly rational when it comes to everything they do in life. I am just going to point out the famous mathematician Ramanujan who was also intensely religious. Let us face it: Pure math is way harder than any computer science problem you are going to solve.
2. You are assuming that every single person who works for the NSA or has a sense of patriotism is necessarily a person whose ideology is influenced by Fox News.