[roenxi]

A core part of the slippery slope argument is some sort of slippage along the slope, ie, change. I'm not arguing anything will change; I'm saying having an impact on the real world always runs an ethical risk. The slope slipped at the birth of commerce, thousands of years ago.

And what if Monitor contracts John & Jane's IT Startup Helpers to do some work? Are they ethically firewalled in some way that Monitor's IT staff are not? Ethics issues could be resolved by clever corporate structure and contracting out services instead of bringing them in-house.