[dsacco]

There are software engineers who follow some definition of ethics, and there are software engineers who ignore some definition of ethics - just like every other profession in the world.

What do you hope to achieve by finding real world examples? People do Bad Things for some definition of bad all the time, no matter their profession, but good luck trying to make any claim to absolute wrongdoing without the discussion devolving into semantics.

It will be very difficult for you to ascribe a moral position to any real world example because the real world isn't binary. To a first approximation, debates about ethics are usually won by vindicating the majority in-group's opinion about something they disagree with.

As you can tell, I'm basically saying this discussion isn't productive. You'll probably get some trendy answers like "NSA" or something to do with "surveillance" but I'll bite - how about the blackhat hackers who are employed by organized crime to de-anonymize "problem people" so those people can be found and "dealt with"? But that's just my opinion.

One of the biggest problems with this sort of thing is that no matter how powerfully you might believe someone working at e.g. the NSA is doing something evil, that individual likely feels just as powerfully that they are working to increase the net good in the world. In fact, they probably have an objectively coherent argument in favor of their position.