In a liberal democracy, the purpose of collecting secret intelligence is to obtain information vital to our interests that potential adversaries—hostile leaders, dictators, terrorists, criminals, and shadowy figures such as cyber attackers—do not want us to know. Consequently, they will want to keep this information secret and may go to extreme and even violent lengths to prevent us from ever uncovering these secrets. It follows that to overcome the will of the people with the secret (and bearing in mind that the most important secrets will be the most closely guarded) we will have to use deceptive, manipulative, and intrusive methods.

This sets out intelligence as a distinctive ethical realm. We would certainly not want such methods to be used in everyday life; the equivalent of listening at keyholes, eavesdropping, recruiting informers to gather information on relatives, or opening the family’s mail. But without using such ethically problematic methods in the service of national security, we will never obtain secret intelligence.

Moral philosophers would say there are three approaches to addressing this dilemma that we could advise intelligence agencies to draw on.

The first is to judge the morality of intelligence agency actions by their consequences. This is the natural starting point for intelligence officers: they have noble purposes—national security and public safety—that legitimate their activity. Such consequentialist approaches are closely linked to the principle of proportionality: the idea that, for example, the degree of intrusion into the private lives of others should relate to the harm the intrusion is intended to prevent. But does this mean that if the threat is great enough, such as a terrorist gang about to commit mass murder, any measure would be justified in trying to stop them, including the extremes of extraordinary rendition and trying to extract their secrets by torture?

This is where the second approach to devising an ethical framework comes in, which is importing moral precepts from outside the profession. This is known as the “deontological” approach. To be deontological is to choose to follow rules. But which rules?

National intelligence professionals might ignore “thou shalt not steal” from the Ten Commandments, since the very business of intelligence is concerned with stealing secrets. The United Nations International Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent European Convention on Human Rights provide very relevant ethical rules, including maintaining the absolute prohibition on torture.

But while some activities are prohibited, others are qualified. In these documents, privacy is a qualified right and the authorities can intrude in defense of national security, upholding the rule of law and safeguarding life—provided this is done in accordance with domestic law, and independently overseen. In that way an intelligence code of ethics for a democracy can still allow intrusive methods to be used, provided adequate safeguards are built in.

It is, however, in the nature of intelligence gathering that it has to take place in secret, often in dangerous faraway places where the intelligence officers may have to make rapid decisions to protect themselves and their sources. As anyone who has brought up teenagers will know, house rules are certainly needed, but when they are out of your sight you cannot oversee them, and you have to rely on their having internalized enough of your code of values to keep them out of real trouble. So it is with intelligence officers.

For this reason, we turn to a third approach—that of personal value ethics. This sort of system affirms how one civilized human being ought to behave toward another, drawing in such considerations as personal respect, honesty, trustworthiness, and empathy. The best intelligence officers have a strong sense of personal ethics and are very aware of their moral responsibility towards their agents and their families including after their service is over.

In our new book, we draw a comparison between the ethic of intelligence and the warrior ethic, and we discuss how over centuries, scholars and theologians evolved a philosophy of “just war” to tame the worst excesses of violence in war. From the “just war” tradition it is possible to derive comparable concepts for “just intelligence” that can be used as guides to clear thinking in unpacking the many moral dilemmas that surround the gathering and use of secret intelligence.

We summarize these as:

• right intention—Intelligence officers should act with integrity—without hidden political or other agendas—including in the authorization of intelligence activity, the analysis, assessment, and the presentation of intelligence judgments to decision-makers.

• proportionality—Intelligence officers should keep the ethical risks of operations in relationship to the harm that the operations are intended to prevent.

• right authority—The level of authority required for an operation should correspond to the ethical risks, and the supervising officers should be held accountable for their decisions and oversight.

• reasonable prospect of success—To prevent general fishing expeditions or mass surveillance, individual operations should be justified through sound probabilistic reasoning of what they are likely to reveal.

• discrimination—The risk of collateral harm, including privacy intrusion into the lives of those who are not the intended targets of intelligence gathering, must be assessed and managed on both human and technological levels.

• necessity—Intrusive investigations should only be conducted with restraint, if no other reasonable way can be found to achieve the authorized mission at lesser ethical risk.

Talking of “principled spying” need therefore not be a contradiction in a liberal democracy provided the three Rs are observed: the Rule of Law is maintained; there is lawful Regulation and oversight; and intelligence agencies act with Restraint in their use of the coercive powers of the nation-state.

We are already experiencing what it is like to live in a digital age when our personal data is harvested and exploited for profit by the private sector. The intelligence and security authorities are also busy exploiting cyberspace to gather data to uncover and track targets and potential targets. All that increases a sense of public unease about whether there is any longer a right to personal privacy. Yet at the same time there is a pressing need for protection for the citizen from a wide range of potential adversaries such as hostile states, terrorists, and criminal groups. The need to clarify the rules over principled intelligence activity has never been greater.

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As Madison well might have predicted, allowing America’s secret agencies to operate free of the checks and balances spelled out in the Constitution would lead to an abuse of power. In 1974, a domestic spy scandal carried out by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and exposed by The New York Times, challenged this intelligence exceptionalism and brought the espionage services into the framework of government accountability that has been a hallmark of America’s democracy.

In 1975, the Church Committee—led by Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho), for whom I served as an aide—uncovered CIA espionage operations directed against anti-Vietnam War protesters (Operation CHAOS); covert schemes perpetrated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to ruin the lives of these protesters and of individuals involved in the civil rights movement (Operation COINTELPRO); and National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping aimed at the telephones of American citizens (Operation MINARET) and the reading of their international cables (Operation SHAMROCK).

The CIA accumulated files on 1.5 million American citizens; infiltrated media, academic, and religious groups inside the United States; and plotted assassinations against foreign leaders in developing nations. The smear tactics of the FBI were intended to blacken the reputations of antiwar and civil rights activists, from the lowliest volunteers to the top leaders. The NSA leaned on flimsy executive orders from the days of the Truman administration to pursue MINARET and SHAMROCK targets throughout the next five presidencies (Dwight D. Eisenhower through Gerald R. Ford), without obtaining renewed authority from any of these White Houses or from Congress.

In the aftermath of these intelligence excesses, in 1975 the Congress moved dramatically (and largely in a bipartisan manner) to stretch the constitutional canvas over the hidden side of America’s government. At the end of its inquiry, the Church Committee successfully advocated the creation of a permanent standing committee for intelligence accountability, known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI). The next year the House followed suit by establishing the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI).

Front page of the Sept. 2, 1963 edition of The Times of Viet Nam, published in Saigon. Photo courtesy of Horst Faas/Associated Press.

In addition, Congress passed legislation to give those two new committees meaningful authority. And with the enactment of the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, the executive branch was required to report to Congress not only on covert actions but also all other significant intelligence activities prior to their implementation. This was a powerful standard of ante facto reporting. With these changes, lawmakers became genuine partners in the intelligence domain, just as the Constitution had prescribed for every other policy pursuit.

Since then, the vigor and success of congressional accountability over intelligence activities has fluctuated from then until now, with a series of high points during the Carter years—the 1980 Intelligence Oversight Act among them. There were several low points: the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration, followed by NSA violations of the law (including the collection of social media “metadata” and the use of warrantless wiretaps against U.S. citizens), and the CIA’s adoption of a torture program in the crucible of fear that followed the 9/11 attacks.

Still, the difference in accountability between the pre-Church Committee era of benign neglect toward the nation’s secret agencies and these post-Committee problems was as stark as night and day. With the Trump Administration, though, intelligence accountability has encountered serious new setbacks.

The President has co-opted the HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes (R-California), who was a member of Trump’s transition team. And the SSCI Chairman, Richard Burr (R-North Carolina), has been a weak overseer, until very recently. Now, to his credit, Burr is leading a relatively bipartisan probe into possible Russian pro-Trump interference in the 2016 presidential election, but he, too, has periodically displayed a fawning posture toward the White House.

This current moment is a good time to think about the fundamental ingredients for the success of spy accountability, of which there are two. Unfortunately, both ingredients are often in short supply.

The first requirement for effective intelligence accountability is that the executive branch and its intelligence apparatus must embrace the concept in good faith—an acknowledgment that the constitutional principles extolled by the nation’s founders apply to the veiled agencies of government, too, not just to the more open departments like Agriculture and Commerce. Lawmakers only know about intelligence activities to the extent that the president and the attorney general, plus the nation’s intelligence chiefs—the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Director of the CIA (D/CIA), and other intelligence agency managers—keep them informed.

Nevertheless, even this basic requirement is often absent. A vivid illustration occurred during the Church Committee inquiry, when a Defense Department truck delivered reams of documents to the panel’s guarded doorstep at the Senate Dirksen Office Building—enough to keep the staff busy for weeks. The problem was, as DOD well knew and the committee soon found out, the mountain of papers was merely a gimcrack devoid of a single useful paper. For the Defense Department—fortified by the triple steel of practiced evasiveness—stonewalling was the name of the game as it single-mindedly hindered and obstructed the committee at every turn. More recently, the second Bush Administration waved off congressional concern by assuring the SSCI Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein (D-California), that the CIA’s torture tactics merely involved a bit of “tummy slapping.” In fact, the Agency was engaged in widespread waterboarding and other cruel interrogation methods.

That’s another reminder of the vitality of the second ingredient for successful intelligence accountability: the will of individual members of Congress to engage in a meaningful examination of spy programs. That requires aggressiveness. One former special assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey (of the Reagan Administration) urged the 9/11 Commission to pursue its investigative responsibilities with a “helicopter-raids-at-dawn, break-down-the-doors, kick-their-rear-ends sort of operation.”

Unfortunately, oversight is rarely like that. The truth is that most lawmakers on SSCI and HPSCI rarely even make it to executive-session hearings, let alone conduct helicopter raids on the CIA or the NSA. Only approximately one-third of the total SSCI and HPSCI membership participated, on average, in executive session hearings during recent years, according to my interviews with staff on these committees. While a professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson famously wrote that “Congress in committee-rooms is Congress at work.” When it comes to intelligence accountability, a good many legislators have failed to show up for work.

Ultimately, it is incumbent upon all Americans to take a more active role in demanding the protection of this nation’s fundamental constitutional liberties, electing only those who vow to take intelligence accountability seriously. The security side of the equation is well represented by the intelligence bureaucracy and its allies in the private sector (such as drone and satellite manufacturers). But the counterbalance of a well-organized and well-funded coalition of privacy groups has yet to form coherently in the United States.

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We need such jokes. Despite all our slogans to the contrary, diversity such as ours isn’t always easy to negotiate. Humor is just one of the ways Americans navigate, narrate, expose, and otherwise unburden ourselves of the absurdities and pitfalls of living in such a complicated place.

Eight years ago, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam released a now-famous study concluding that diversity lowers social trust. His massive survey of 30,000 Americans found that if you live in a more diverse community, you’re less likely to trust the people in it. Those of us living in ethnically diverse settings, the study found, “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity,” and to spend more time sitting in front of the television.

But Putnam didn’t explore the other side of that coin: how millions of us manage to overcome the social distrust that diversity can foster.

I have a very devout Nicaraguan-born friend who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She likes to say that practicing Catholicism would be so much easier had she stayed in the country of her birth. Here in the U.S., she’s a member of a diverse congregation made up of Filipinos, Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, and a few older Anglos and African-Americans. Recently, the priest asked the congregation to vote on which devotional figure they should install in the church first. Most Nicaraguan Catholics maintain a special devotion to Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. Mexicans are partial to the Virgin of Guadalupe, while Filipinos venerate the Holy Child of Atocha. My friend was obliged to sift through her feelings about her tradition and others, as well as to consider what she thought was fair and best for the common good. In the end, she voted for the Holy Child of Atocha, mostly because of how impressed she’s always been by the dedication of her congregation’s Filipinos, who show up even to services that compete with big sporting events.

Successful navigation of this country’s diversity has always required extra thought, and more brainpower. The more diverse the location, the more brainpower required by the people who live there.

In more homogenous parishes, towns, states, and countries, residents aren’t necessarily obliged to take that extra intellectual step. In places where the overwhelming majority of residents share a common background, they are more likely to maintain an unspoken consensus about the meaning of institutions and practices. That consensus, Dutch philosopher Bart van Leeuwen reminds us, is enforced “through sayings and jokes, in ways of speaking and moving, and in subtle facial expressions that betray surprise or recognition.” In other words, the way things are is so self-evident that they don’t require a second thought.

Diversity, however, requires second thoughts. When the consensus is challenged in a homogenous place by the presence of new people, things get interesting. The familiar signs and symbols that undergird our implicit understanding of the world can change in meaning. The presence of conflicting worldviews causes confusion, uncertainty, and alienation for holdovers and newcomers alike. These feelings can either cause people to draw back into themselves—or force them to articulate and justify themselves to those who don’t share their view of the world. Or both.

Because of our long history of immigration, the disruptions of diversity have been commonplace in American life. The late historian Timothy L. Smith famously called migration to the U.S. a “theologizing experience” that forced newcomers into the existential dilemma of having to “determine how to act in these new circumstances by reference not simply to a dominant ‘host’ culture but to a dozen competing subcultures, all of which were in the process of adjustment.”

This burden—of having to find your place in a landscape both shifting and unfamiliar—has played a powerful role in forging both the American character and our institutions. I’m no linguist, but I suspect it explains the very frank and direct manner of speech that Americans are known for around the world. Diversity and continuous migration—both foreign and domestic—make it difficult to forge a long-lived unspoken cultural consensus. In its absence, people must articulate their positions in as straightforward and assertive a way as possible to avoid misinterpretation.

Despite the fact that diversity is so central to the American condition, scholars who’ve studied the cognitive effects of diversity have long made the mistake of treating homogeneity as the norm. Only this year did a group of researchers from MIT, Columbia University, and Northwestern University publish a paper questioning the conventional wisdom that homogeneity represents some kind of objective baseline for comparison or “neutral indicator of the ideal response in a group setting.”

To bolster their argument, the researchers cite a previous study that found that members of homogenous groups tasked with solving a mystery tend to be more confident in their problem-solving skills than their performance actually merits. By contrast, the confidence level of individuals in diverse groups corresponds better with how well their group actually performs. The authors concluded that homogenous groups “were actually further than diverse groups from an objective index of accuracy.”

The researchers also refer to a 2006 experiment showing that homogenous juries made “more factually inaccurate statements and considered a narrower range of information” than racially diverse juries. What these and other findings suggest, wrote the researchers, is that people in diverse groups “are more likely to step outside their own perspective and less likely to instinctively impute their own knowledge onto others” than people in homogenous groups.

So it should follow that operating in a diverse environment makes you smarter. Not that that makes it any easier. Diversity doesn’t require us simply to learn how to celebrate our differences. It requires us to tax our brains by questioning our worldviews, our beliefs, and our institutions. American ingenuity isn’t simply born of the fusion of peoples into your favorite metaphor for mixture. Whether we realize it or not, it’s the good-humored hard work of living with people different from us that has always been the source of America’s genius.

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