You don't see a difference because you don't seem to have a strong feeling about the ethics of these kinds of jobs. I don't say this to attack you or to judge you.
To understand what others are saying here, you need to substitute some other ethical question that you do have strong feelings about.
Regarding your game-theory comments -- you're implicitly assuming that "winning" involves maximizing your income. For me, how I feel about myself is part of assessing any potential win or loss.
Fundamentally, you can't really answer ethical or moral questions using market or game-theoretic thinking, without considering how you feel about what you're doing as part of the win/loss metric. If you don't care about an issue, you don't care about it.
So, "how will my caring about this make a difference" isn't really the right question. Instead, ask "why should I care about this?"
Yes I might lack empathy for other people's privacy, especially as it seems that most people just don't care. Those that care can use technology to benefit themselves. You're right though, I have a hard time answering why I should care, personally. If I eliminate emotion from the question, I cannot come up with any rational reasons.
But more than that, blaming a single low-level actor in a system seems kinda pointless. It's like hating an individual DEA agent instead of the idiotic system that creates the DEA. Shaming DEA agents will accomplish next to nothing; the effort would be better spent where it might make an impact (like on elected officials).
The number of hackers you need to implement surveillance (or land mines) is pretty low, and you can get people from the worldwide population. Not to mention there are going to be a fair number of patriots that believe what they're doing is good, anyways.
The only question is which individual will profit and how much from actually building it. In this hypothetical situation, I can't see any reason to let someone else (who may have values I don't like) get paid to build the technology.
To understand what others are saying here, you need to substitute some other ethical question that you do have strong feelings about.
Regarding your game-theory comments -- you're implicitly assuming that "winning" involves maximizing your income. For me, how I feel about myself is part of assessing any potential win or loss.
Fundamentally, you can't really answer ethical or moral questions using market or game-theoretic thinking, without considering how you feel about what you're doing as part of the win/loss metric. If you don't care about an issue, you don't care about it.
So, "how will my caring about this make a difference" isn't really the right question. Instead, ask "why should I care about this?"