Ethics and the Future of Spying Technology, National Security and Intelligence Collection

This volume examines the ethical issues generated by recent developments in intelligence collection and offers a.comprehenisve analysis of the key legal, moral and social questions thereby raised. Foreign and domestic intelligence agencies have received an exponential increase in their levels of funding and public support in the decade after the September 11 terrorist attacks, but have now entered a period of broad public scrutiny and skepticism. This is because despite the huge investment in the human and financial resources of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and its data-collection partners abroad, the large majority of Western nations remain vulnerable to unconventional threats. On a number fronts – interrogation, torture, drone strikes and electronic surveillance – critics from both inside and outside government are now starting to question the purpose, reach and moral authority of the United States-led intelligence establishment. In many respects, the way in which the huge budgets and increasing power of intelligence agencies have collided with public opinion is reminiscent of the scandal-reform cycle that took place nearly four decades ago. In the mid-1970s, a US Senate Committee led by Frank Church produced multiple volumes of information detailing intelligence failures and the abuses of power in relation to the CIA's assassination schemes, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's harassment of Martin Luther King and the National Security Agency's (NSA) efforts to spy on nearly 80,000 American citizens. The scandal resulted in sweeping reforms and the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that requires court approval to eavesdrop on American soil, a presidential ban on extrajudicial assassination and the establishment of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees that were supposed to provide ethical oversight of the various intelligence agencies. While these reforms were stunning at the time, they were not enough and it is now time for all those affected by US intelligence collection practices to investigate their ethical, legal and social implications.All of this takes place in absolute secrecy, with the exception of the occasional leak from concerned individuals, which is moral issue in itself. The problem here is that by definition, a democracy revolves around an informed and engaged citizenry. The aim of this volume is to give some insight into the workings of the intelligence community and 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. It contains sections on interrogation and torture, intelligence's relation to war, remote killing, cyber surveillance, responsibility and governance. This book will be of much interest to students of ethics, intelligence studies, security studies, foreign policy and IR in general.