Ethics în Intelligence

1. General considerations

Because of the insistances of some international organizations for protecting human rights and those of the mass-media with regards to the use of torture in order to obtain information from supposed terrorists, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament put some pressure on the secrete services in order for them to adopt some ethical reglementations.

In 2005, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) voted a resolution on the establishing of a European ethics code in the intelligence department which was to be applied in all of the member states.

2. The ethics of the intelligence process – a major preoccupation of the intelligence agencies

A significant part of the intelligence process can not be a subject of public observation. The information regarding sources, methods and operations and even cooperating with services from other countries are classified even in the most transparent democracies.

Keeping secrets can make most cases remain unknown, therefore making ethics one of the primary internal control mechanisms. From this point of view studying and exploiting the modalities by which ethic standards can be improved is imperative.

In the battle against terrorism, intelligence agencies were involved in a series of highly publicized controversies, that created a major dilemma for the intelligence gathering process in open societies: how can they protect democratic societies, if the most part of their activities is classified and what can they do in order to not break any laws involving human rights in the name of safety and national security.

The term intelligence process ethics according to most authors is an oxymoron , but it is considered valuable in sustaining the efforts of improving professionalism and control of the intelligence agencies.

The primary analysis instruments of the intelligence process ethics are:

- the relationship between ethics and law

- the institutional and individual levels of ethic responsibility

- Ethics approach of the intelligence process.

The activities of intelligence agencies are regulated by national and international laws. Because of the fact that people working in this field have to handle incredibly complex tasks, unforeseen situations and they have to take difficult decisions, laws cannot be designed in such a way that they could cover every conceivable situation. One of the main characteristics of intelligence activities is discretion, which is defined as a “choice explicitly permitted by law or that exists through the inherent ambiguity of the law”. On the conditions of legislative ambiguity, ethics becomes an essential guide for taking action. Because of this laws are necessary, but they are not enough.

From this point of view, the usefulness of codes of ethics in intelligence agencies may be questioned, especially under the conditions of predictable reluctance of some specialists in the field to rigid ethics codes. Regarding the level of ethical responsibility, it can be individual and institutional. Intelligence services are responsible for the organization's ethical standards as a whole and are required to establish ethical parameters that employees must respect.

According to specialized literature there are 3 ethical approaches in the field of intelligence: realistic, one that takes into account the consequences and the deontological one.