Ethics in news business corporate espionage12/30/2023 Spies attained a glamorous reputation as international jetsetters-secretive and emotionally damaged, but still quietly heroic-in the early 1900s, largely thanks to the novels of William Le Queux. Kant believed that espionage undermined the trust of the belligerent parties in wartime and jeopardised interwar peace. The philosopher Immanuel Kant described spying as “that infernal art” because it necessarily involves deception. According to Fabre, this is not only because most espionage is hidden from view, but because it has often been considered a dishonourable profession. It has even prompted an anonymous response from the ethics counsellor of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).įabre begins by suggesting some of the reasons why there are comparatively few works on the ethics of espionage. Given how important espionage is and given its inherent risks-both to a government’s reputation and to the lives of those involved-a public examination of the ethics of spying is overdue.Ĭécile Fabre’s new book, Spying Through a Glass Darkly, is a welcome contribution to the conversation. In this world, having a source in a president’s inner circle or a terror cell, access to a political leader’s personal mobile phone conversations or the ability to place software onto another government’s secure server is becoming increasingly vital. We live in a world where a dictator’s dreams of establishing his own legacy can launch an invasion force that crashes global markets where malware passed to a terrorist group by a hostile state can turn off the life-support systems in our hospitals and internationally coordinated political ideologues can collaborate with private intelligence companies to attempt to subvert our democracies. After pivoting from the ideological conflict of the Cold War to the Global War on Terror, intelligence agencies are shifting their focus once again: this time, to a web of state rivalries that threaten to spill over from competition into conflict. Espionage is a response to uncertainty-and uncertainty abounds. The collection and analysis of information has never been more important than it is today, in our fast-moving, interdependent, multi-polar world. However, in my own professional experience, intelligence officers are very concerned about the ethics of what they are engaged in, including who they should be spying on, and how they should spy. There has, rightly, been scrutiny of how soldiers have been acting on the battlefield, but next to no attention has been paid to how the spies involved have been acting. Yet there has been little focus on the espionage activities associated with this war. There are also, hopefully, spies trying to gain insight into who might succeed Putin. At the same time, spies from all around the world are trying to gain insight into President Putin’s mind and predict what he might do next, including under what circumstances he would use nuclear weapons. As the war in Ukraine continues, the pressure on western, Ukrainian and Russian spies to gain intelligence that will give one side a battlefield advantage is intense.
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