That was all I had. When I start a book, I spend about the first two to three months working on the characters. In my mind, the minutiae of life is what makes us who we are. So once those characters tell me who they are, I can really start a skeletal plot around them. I have to know the ending any time I start, because if you don't know where you are going, then you are not in control of your novel.
Some people can do that.
For me, I am not in control of that scene. You have your protagonist, Ben, and his roommates use their positions in ethically questionable ways. I think the characters are human. What they do at their jobs wasn't meant to show any kind of conspiracy in the government. It was meant to say that we all make human mistakes.