Mr. Daniels,
I thank you for your open statement.
Honestly I regret your choice, since it is hard to see any responsibility weight pressing on your shoulders.
Regarding secrecy concerns of governmental flights like intelligence or military mobility, we can assume that critical flights will take care not to transmit the ADS-B part. The responsibility is with the aircraft operators, exerted by the flight crews. So filtering out those flights is actually their responsibility conveniently outsourced to you guys.
When it comes to the protection of those flights against violent acts like terrorism, hijacking or any other criminal activity, it appears hypocritical to develop a "code of conduct" which protects only rare governmental flights but not the millions of civilian passengers who are still visible on your website.
Considering the required assertiveness of a potential thread, I also can't see how this code of conduct is suited to counter aforementioned threats at all. A hypothetical assailant and also the public media don't have to rely on a flight tracking website. All that is needed is a netbook and a DVB-T-stick and all the desired information within easily the next 50 NM is accessible. Your code of conduct is therefore obviously futile to prevent anything.
What you call responsible behavior seems to be nothing further than pleasing authorities by submitting to their expectations. You give in to demands which don't even have a lawful basis. In any other aspect, this filtering doesn't benefit anyone.
Unfortunately you don't meet my (the user's) expectations with that decision.
My idea of responsibility would have been, that you will show everyone and everything which transmit an ADS-B signal. Whoever transmits ADS-B has to expect to be visible. Governmental affairs requiring secrecy won't transmit it. If they do, we should watch, because if we don't observe their code of conduct, who will?
Though disagreeing, I respectfully accept your choice and again thank you for your response.
Sad to say, I will carry my rather tiny contribution elsewhere and no longer upload my feed to your site.