Principled Spying

Intelligence agencies provide critical information to national security and foreign policy decision makers, but spying also poses inherent dilemmas for liberty, privacy, human rights, and diplomacy. Principled Spying explores how to strike a balance between necessary intelligence activities and protecting democratic values by developing a new framework of ethics. David Omand and Mark Phythian structure this book as an engaging debate between a former national security practitioner and an intelligence scholar. Rather than simply presenting their positions, throughout the book they pose key questions to each other and to the reader and offer contrasting perspectives to stimulate further discussion. They demonstrate the value for both practitioners and the public of weighing the dilemmas of secret intelligence through ethics. The chapters in the book cover key areas including human intelligence, surveillance, acting on intelligence, and oversight and accountability. The authors disagree on some key questions, but in the course of their debate they demonstrate that it is possible to find a balance between liberty and security. This book is accessible reading for concerned citizens, but it also delivers the sophisticated insights of a high-ranking former practitioner and a distinguished scholar.

Collecting and analyzing intelligence are essential to national security and an effective foreign policy. The public also looks to its security agencies for protection from terrorism, from serious criminality, and to be safe in using cyberspace. But intelligence activities pose inherent dilemmas for democratic societies. How far should the government be allowed to go in collecting and using intelligence before it jeopardizes the freedoms that citizens hold dear? This is one of the great unresolved issues of public policy, and it sits at the heart of broader debates concerning the relationship between the citizen and the state. In Safe and Sound, national security practitioner David Omand and intelligence scholar Mark Phythian offer an ethical framework for examining these issues and structure the book as an engaging debate. Rather than simply presenting their positions, throughout the book they pose key questions to each other and to the reader and offer contrasting perspectives to stimulate further discussion. They probe key areas of secret intelligence including human intelligence, surveillance, ethics of covert and clandestine actions, and oversight and accountability. The authors disagree on some key questions, but in the course of their debate they demonstrate that it is possible to strike a balance between liberty and security.

CÃ(c)cile Fabre draws back the curtain on the ethics of espionage and counterintelligence. In a book rich with historical examples she argues that spying is only justified to protect against ongoing violations of fundamental rights. Blackmail, bribery, mass surveillance, cyberespionage, treason, and other nefarious activities are considered.

The Psychology of Spies and Spying tells the story of the people involved in spying: the human sources (agents) who betray their country or organisation and the professional intelligence officers who manage the collection and reporting process

In To Catch a Spy: The Art of Counterintelligence, former Chief of CIA counterintelligence James M. Olson offers a wake-up call for the American public, showing how the US is losing the intelligence war and how our country can do a better job of protecting its national security and trade secrets.

Survival, the IISS’s bimonthly journal, challenges conventional wisdom and brings fresh, often controversial, perspectives on strategic issues of the moment. In this issue: Adam Roberts explores pandemics and politics through the ages, arguing that trust in leadership is essential in the struggle against infectious diseases Rebecca Barber and Sarah Teitt contend that ASEAN should take a more activist approach to the Rohingya crisis to salvage its credibility Greg Austin assesses the strategic implications of China’s weak cyber defences Øystein Tunsjø casts doubt on the prospect of the Arctic becoming a theatre of great-power conflict And eight more thought-provoking pieces, as well as our regular book reviews and Noteworthy column.

In the mid-1930s, just as the United States was embarking on a policy of neutrality, Nazi Germany launched a program of espionage against the unwary nation. Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones’s fascinating history provides the first full account of Nazi spies in 1930s America and how they were exposed in a high-profile FBI case that became a national sensation.

This volume examines the ethical issues generated by recent developments in intelligence collection and offers a comprehensive analysis of the key legal, moral and social questions thereby raised. Intelligence officers, whether gatherers, analysts or some combination thereof, are operating in a sea of social, political, scientific and technological change. This book examines the new challenges faced by the intelligence community as a result of these changes. It looks not only at how governments employ spies as a tool of state and how the ultimate outcomes are judged by their societies, but also at the mind-set of the spy. In so doing, this volume casts a rare light on an often ignored dimension of spying: the essential role of truth and how it is defined in an intelligence context. This book offers some insights into the workings of the intelligence community and aims to provide the first comprehensive and unifying analysis of the relevant moral, legal and social questions, with a view toward developing policy that may influence real-world decision making. The contributors analyse the ethics of spying across a broad canvas – historical, philosophical, moral and cultural – with chapters covering interrogation and torture, intelligence’s relation to war, remote killing, cyber surveillance, responsibility and governance. In the wake of the phenomena of WikiLeaks and the Edward Snowden revelations, the intelligence community has entered an unprecedented period of broad public scrutiny and scepticism, making this volume a timely contribution. This book will be of much interest to students of ethics, intelligence studies, security studies, foreign policy and IR in general.