They are still trying to recruit a diverse, capable group of patriotic employees, so that the workforce has the full range of skills and opinions for it to do its proper mission, and identify and correct any abuses.

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.

Yes, it's important to note that there are not people who are simply toiling away, objecting to the work, and reluctantly carrying it out. These are people publicly advocating for the organization, and trying to get more people to join it.

That's one theory of change. Unfortunately, the oppressiveness of domestic surveillance could get a lot worse before it gets better. There might even be a point of no return, where the system decays into something like North Korea, rather than bouncing back to a better state.

I doubt the NSA/FBI/DoD/etc are going away anytime soon, so a simplistic strategy of "try to deny them good people, force them to get worse so they eventually collapse" is unlikely to result in either marginal improvements in their behavior, or their wholesale replacement by better institutions. This 'talent boycott' could just mean more acrimony, abuse, and even violence without ultimate remedy.

Some diseases don't get worse before they get better. They get worse before they get fatal.