Principled Spying

Intelligence agencies provide critical information to national security and foreign policy decision makers, yet spying also poses inherent dilemmas for liberty, privacy, human rights, and diplomacy. Principled Spying explores how to strike a balance between conducting necessary intelligence activities and protecting democratic values through the development of a new ethics framework. David Omand, a former national security practitioner, and Mark Phythian, an intelligence scholar, structure this book as an engaging debate between the authors. The questions they pose to each other and to the reader offer contrasting perspectives to stimulate further discussion and demonstrate the value for both practitioners and the public of weighing the dilemmas of secret intelligence through ethics. Chapters in the book cover key areas including human intelligence, surveillance, acting on intelligence, and oversight and accountability. While the authors disagree on some key questions, in the course of their debate they demonstrate that it is possible to find this balance between security and liberty.