#Unethical espionage definition code#

National intelligence professionals might ignore вЂњthou shalt not stealвЂќ from the Ten Commandments, since the very business of intelligence is concerned with stealing secrets.

#Unethical espionage definition code#

But which rules?ДЄs anyone who has brought up teenagers will know, house rules are certainly needed, but when they are out of your sight you cannot oversee them, and you have to rely on their having internalized enough of your code of values to keep them out of real trouble. To be deontological is to choose to follow rules. This is known as the вЂњdeontologicalвЂќ approach. This is where the second approach to devising an ethical framework comes in, which is importing moral precepts from outside the profession. But does this mean that if the threat is great enough, such as a terrorist gang about to commit mass murder, any measure would be justified in trying to stop them, including the extremes of extraordinary rendition and trying to extract their secrets by torture? Such consequentialist approaches are closely linked to the principle of proportionality: the idea that, for example, the degree of intrusion into the private lives of others should relate to the harm the intrusion is intended to prevent. This is the natural starting point for intelligence officers: they have noble purposes-national security and public safety-that legitimate their activity. The first is to judge the morality of intelligence agency actions by their consequences. Moral philosophers would say there are three approaches to addressing this dilemma that we could advise intelligence agencies to draw on. But without using such ethically problematic methods in the service of national security, we will never obtain secret intelligence. We would certainly not want such methods to be used in everyday life the equivalent of listening at keyholes, eavesdropping, recruiting informers to gather information on relatives, or opening the familyвЂ™s mail. This sets out intelligence as a distinctive ethical realm.

It follows that to overcome the will of the people with the secret (and bearing in mind that the most important secrets will be the most closely guarded) we will have to use deceptive, manipulative, and intrusive methods. Consequently, they will want to keep this information secret and may go to extreme and even violent lengths to prevent us from ever uncovering these secrets. In a liberal democracy, the purpose of collecting secret intelligence is to obtain information vital to our interests that potential adversaries-hostile leaders, dictators, terrorists, criminals, and shadowy figures such as cyber attackers-do not want us to know.