Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence

by David Omand

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Espionage

304 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2018

Reviews

[Marie Froste · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has some fundamental issues that it neither discusses nor overcomes, the greatest of which is the mixup of ethics and law. Ethics and law are not the same, and what is legal is not always moral. The authors seem entirely unaware of the inherent difficulties in assuming the two are the same. This makes for problematic conclusions and recommendations.

The book does ask many interesting questions, but leaves most of them unanswered which is quite unfortunate. Add to that a lacking presentation of the book - while divided into chapters it entirely lacks any headings - and it results in a review of only two stars.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I have seen this volume I wanted it bad. I was expecting a comedy book. Instead I almost fell off my chair. Torture. Secret prisons. Political assassinations. Subverting democratic vote. Drug and weapons trafficking. True values, for an ethical field of work. And as long as there will be kings, monsters like Omand will weave their stories or ethics.