[moved message, originally by @Andrew F] That's a deeply unfair question, much like asking a cryptography developer why their code is used to let criminals operate without getting caught. It fits together because the Rust community doesn't have control over everyone who downloads the code, just the interactions in official forums. This is implicit in the concept of an open source project. More on topic, everyone in this community should be reconciled with the fact that if they are sufficiently successful, their work will eventually be used for evil and they won't be able to stop it. That's what it means to build tools.

To answer his question directly, the Rust CoC is to make explicit how you are expected to behave as part of the community developing rustc. It has essentially nothing to do with how people use rustc.

A CoC offers protection to those on the losing end of power imbalances. Communities with a good CoC have in them a recognition of such power dynamics, since that's what the CoC would have emerged from. Surveillance is a tool that reinforces and entrenches similar power imbalances in the broader public sphere — so it'd make sense for the folks who write these CoCs, who have this sensitivity to power, to want to do what they can to protest surveillance. To me, the tweet makes perfect sense and I completely see the connection. The question becomes, what can those CoC-authoring, power-levelling folks do about the problem of their work being coopted for evil? That might seem like an irrelevant matter. If so, you probably first need to decide how you feel about power imbalances in general. It might seem like an intractable problem. Well, computing cultures through history are full of people making great efforts, some more successful than others, to address these exact sorts of issues. Decentralization, copyleft, FOSS, ubiquitous CoCs, the startup model, torrenting, tor, hacking, C3, the list goes on and on. I think it's totally within the realm of possibility that if a community like Rust wanted to take a stand against surveillance, or the military-industrial complex, folks within that community (or adjacent to it, or intersecting with it) might birth such a movement that produces a new counterculture.