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.

The post Can Spies Be Ethical? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Global domination was indeed Moscow’s declared aim. The issue, however, was whether this goal was at all practicable.

The Red Scare blended neatly with popular hostility to mass immigration in America, particularly against a surge of Jews fleeing the anti-Semitic heartlands of Eastern Europe. Responding to hostility, many Jews embraced the inclusive internationalist ideals of Communism rather than the outlandish idea of building a Jewish state in the deserts of British-controlled Arab Palestine. But they were a minority, drawn in by radical idealism and anti-fascism. And the American opposition to wider Jewish immigration from these areas was clearly colored by racism, especially the anti-Semitism of the time.

Although there was little justification for the scare-mongering, the hysteria was enough to spur the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which put a halt to the inflow of immigrants without visas. Fears began to dissipate. The 1927 execution of Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchist immigrants accused of murder on doubtful evidence, marked the high tide of the irrational anti-red (and mostly anti-foreigner) hysteria in American life.

Ironically, it was around this time that real dangers actually began to emerge. But, having cried wolf once too often, doomsayers then faced an uphill task through the ‘30s trying to convince the government and the American public that Communist threats of any kind actually existed.

Fear of Communism and fear of Soviet espionage were closely entangled because a few members of the miniscule American Communist Party were, in fact, involved in spying for Moscow. Most adherents had no idea this kind of thing was going on—the practice was confined to the shadows, restricted to a few specially chosen for what they had to offer. But, as was the case with Communist Parties elsewhere in the world, those recruited saw it as their duty to serve. And recent archival revelations from Moscow show just how persistent the Kremlin was in its attempts to penetrate the American system.

Initially the civilian branch of Soviet intelligence—OGPU, then NKVD—had little luck recruiting American spies. Yuri Markin (codename Oskar), the illegal “rezident”—as the Russians called their station chiefs—from from 1932-1934, was murdered by persons unknown, the victim of a violent encounter in a New York bar. His replacement, Boris Bazarov (codenames, Kin, Da Vinci, Nord), worked in tandem with the ‘legal’ rezident (who was under diplomatic cover), Pyotr Guttseit (codename Nikolai). He had much better luck, including recruiting sources with direct access to the State Department and one connected to President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle. But the successful spy was recalled to Moscow in 1937, where he became a victim of Stalin’s paranoid purge of those seen as connected to foreigners (mass executions that included even George Kennan’s dentist at the American embassy). His successor, Ishak Akhmerov (codename Yung), took over and married a distant relative of Communist Party chief Earl Browder. Browder himself ensured that ties to Soviet intelligence became indistinguishable from Party work; his wife, Kitty (‘Gipsy’) Harris, worked for the Soviets and assisted (and slept with) their British spy Donald Maclean in London and then Paris in the late ‘30s.

The most successful operation at that time, however, came from a group of covert operatives organized by the American agriculturalist Harold Ware. The ring included Alger Hiss, Donald, and other federal officials who were convinced that the need to confront the threat from fascism eclipsed all other loyalties. They believed that the road to socialism was inevitable, and that the socialist-leaning policies of Roosevelt’s New Deal were merely the taste of things to come. This operation came under Soviet military intelligence, known as the Fourth Directorate, the NKVD’s main rival. Although their infiltration went deep, none of it added up to much—it was simply ‘music of the future’.

The stakes were raised, however, when the U.S. entered WWII in December 1941—and the Americans joined the British to develop the atomic bomb. Soviet focus on scientific and industrial intelligence (NTR), which had its own section within the NKVD, switched abruptly from London to Washington. Though intelligence boss Lavrenty Beria dragged his feet on the issue, the NTR foresaw the significant role the bomb would play and pushed it to the forefront of their priorities. Once the directive was set by Stalin in 1942, Soviet efforts knew no limits. Operation Enormoz, directed at uncovering the secret of atomic bomb construction, took high priority. The Kremlin was looking ahead to the aftermath of war. The balance of power could ultimately depend who had the bomb. And those who volunteered for the cause were putting their lives at risk, as they were soon to find out.

The American authorities had absolutely no idea what the Russians were up to until very late in the game. Good liberals scoffed at the idea that Moscow could be spying on a wartime ally, even as some of their best friends were actually secret members of the Communist Party and spies for Russia. The Roosevelt administration declined to follow up on tips about suspected infiltration. It wasn’t until the very public defection of a Soviet Embassy cipher clerk, who snuck out documentation showing the magnitude of Soviet atomic espionage that had been going on, that the issue finally came to a head. Soviet spy networks were quickly rooted out. The consequences proved cataclysmic for Americans caught serving the Communist cause. Among those swept up were Julius Rosenberg, an engineer who handed Moscow classified information about the U.S. atomic program, and his wife Ethel (against whom there was little solid evidence).

By the early 1950s, when the Rosenbergs were executed, Washington was again gripped with widespread hysteria about Communist penetration of American society and government.

The Russians, meanwhile, had been closing down all operations in the late 1940s in order to save their agents; and only well after the death of Stalin in 1953 were they able to begin seriously rebuilding their networks in America. But these networks never acquired the significance they had once had. Atomic espionage in the United States, carried out by misguided idealists who saw in the Soviets a progressive force, proved the high point of Russian intelligence operations targeting America.

Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, followed by the Soviet intervention in Hungary, destroyed any remaining allure Moscow may have held for young idealists in the West. Thus, although President Lyndon Johnson dearly hoped to uncover Moscow’s clammy hand at work behind the protest movement against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, no amount of effort by the FBI and CIA could uncover anything of significance. International communism, whatever challenges it still posed overseas, no longer posed the threat of creating a fifth column at home.

Though the Russians did have dramatic success in penetrating both the FBI and CIA in the 1980s, it didn’t impact the American psyche as they would have two decades earlier. Yes, they were serious security lapses, but they involved lone, disaffected or greedy double agents like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen. There was nothing idealistic, nothing connected to a larger Soviet appeal, in their betrayal.

By the 1980s, the issue of socialism in American political life had become completely divorced from the issue of relations with the Soviet Union. And as the USSR dissolved from within and came to an end in 1992, the long dark shadow it cast over America finally passed forever.

Even when revelations of post-Soviet Russian spying reemerged in more recent years; most Americans just shrugged their shoulders, or met the news with a nostalgic chuckle and a mention of the good old Cold War days. Other challenges, most prominently 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, had reconnected domestic internal security concerns with international relations in an even more dramatic manner. And as the generations move on, distant memories grossly exaggerated fears recede from our shared consciousness.

The post The (Actual) Communist Agents Who Lurked Among Us appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Instead, they found people like me.

On September 26, 2007, long before the surveillance program was public knowledge, I received a phone call from a blocked number. The voice on the other side identified himself as a detective from the NYPD anti-terrorism unit. He and another detective, from the FBI’s weapons of mass destruction unit, wanted to meet with me in person, and they wanted to meet within 30 minutes. It was an urgent matter.

During our very brief conversation, the NYPD detective asked me where I was. Because I was going to be with a friend of mine in Manhattan’s Koreatown, we decided to meet on a nearby midtown corner. Rushing, I arrived about 10 minutes early. During those 10 minutes, time seemed to stop altogether. Why was I so important for them? What had I done that was so wrong?

I had talked to NYPD officers before. On September 11, 2001, I saw the second plane crash into the World Trade Center with my own eyes while reporting live over the phone from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade for Kanal-D TV in Turkey. I had worked on a top floor of the South Tower as a photographer from August 2000 to May 2001. After the attacks, I spent the next few months at Ground Zero, interviewing firefighters, rescue workers, and police officers. By 2001, I had lived in New York for three years. But September 11 became a defining moment in my personal life. For the first time, I felt like a New Yorker.

The detectives arrived five minutes late. They found me quickly. How did they know what I looked like? I said hello and shook hands with them. There was a café right on the corner, so I invited them to sit down and chat inside. They didn’t object.

It was right after the busy lunch hour. People were still running in and out of the café. We sat down at a table, and I asked them how they liked their coffee. Unprepared for such an offer, they both asked for regular coffee with milk and sugar. I also bought three bagels.

In Turkish culture, coffee symbolizes friendship and trust. Even in a remote village, a stranger is offered coffee upon arrival. I offered the detectives coffee because I didn’t feel hostile toward them; I assumed they were protecting me. And I wanted them to feel comfortable and safe.

They tried to be friendly but didn’t show any emotion. I gave each man my business card as I put coffee and bagels down at the table. They both took a minute to read my name, although they kept mispronouncing it with their heavy Brooklyn Italian accents. It was like watching The Godfather. This was starting to feel like fun. With a wide smile, I asked, “What can I do for you?”

They took some papers out from their generic black handbags. The FBI detective spoke first: “How do you know this Mary?”

I actually didn’t know anyone named Mary, so I asked him to rephrase his question. He handed over one of the pages and asked me again, “How do you know that Mary?”

The paper was a printout of one of my e-mail messages. I was terrified: He knew my password. I thought it would be dull to ask him how he had obtained it. So after slowly reading my own e-mail, which some other person had printed without my consent or knowledge, I started explaining.

The day before, on September 25, 2007, I had written to an official named Mary at the Florida Fertilizer & Agrichemical Association about a possible business deal with a Turkish company. A distant cousin of mine, who owned a large fertilizer distribution company, was looking to import U.S. fertilizer. Since my cousin didn’t speak any English, he asked me to help him find factories here. After some research, I had contacted Mary to see if any of her organization’s members were interested. At some place in my e-mail, after apologizing for a late reply, I had written:

Yesterday I was at First Lady Bush’s luncheon. It was interesting as 35 first ladies came together to support education. By the way, I spoke with my cousin about the amount of fertilizer he was interested to buy, and he said he would buy around 50,000 tons.

I clarified in detail for the detectives: that I had never met Mary in person, that my distant cousin was a legitimate businessman, and that the Florida Fertilizer & Agrichemical Association had requested his contact information before they even spoke with me.

The detectives listened with suspicion, often giving each other sidelong glances. I continued explaining, and because I thought it might help me, I showed them my press badges from the State Department and United Nations.

Then, one at a time and in different words, each detective asked if I knew how to make bombs using fertilizer. At that moment, I figured out what was going on. I’d had no idea until then that fertilizer was used in bombmaking. How ignorant of me! I felt a sense of overwhelming shame.

The detectives asked me more questions—about Turkey, Islam, the Turkish-American community in New York, and whether I knew people here who could be al-Qaida sympathizers.

By the end of our meeting, the detectives recognized that my case was “dead.”

What I didn’t understand was why they had brought me in for questioning in the first place. All of the information about my cousin, his company, and my involvement in the deal could be found in previous e-mails—to which both the NYPD and FBI had unfettered access. But they still wanted to make sure I was not a terrorist.

Two detectives, whom I had never seen or heard of before—two very foreign people—had just reminded me of what I had written. The feeling of having any kind of privacy was shattered in my mind. What else did they know?

We shook hands and the detectives left, their bagels all eaten and coffee cups empty. I was left with a feeling of betrayal—and questions. I loved New York City so much that I had adopted it as my new home. I worked hard and paid my taxes. I even asked people on the streets to clean up after their dogs. Why didn’t the United States and the city of New York treat me equally? And, how should I respond? Should I pretend this meeting never took place—and keep writing e-mails as though it was perfectly natural for strangers to be reading all my communications? Or should I be alarmed by the invasion—and lose my trust in government?

At first, I thought my case had nothing to do with spying on Muslims, but as I heard more and more stories from others who had had similar experiences, I became convinced that surveillance was being conducted indiscriminately on thousands of other Muslims. When I write an e-mail message today, I do so with full awareness that a stranger who is very suspicious of me is reading it. I feel sorry for the person surveilling my messages, since he or she has the job of a robot, deciphering nonexistent codes in my e-mails rather than having real conversations with other humans.

But I feel even more sorry for Muslim-Americans. When your own government treats you as a criminal, where can you find justice? Had I not been Muslim, would that meeting with the cops ever have taken place? Did our conversation make America safer? Would a professional bomb-maker ever use e-mail to buy fertilizer? And, why would anybody’s religion matter? Because terrorism has no religion, and religion has no terrorism.

Eventually, news reports made it clear that the NYPD was spying on Muslims digitally and treating mosques as potential terrorist hubs. But Muslims who have committed acts of terrorism have neither used mosques as their bases nor used electronic means of communications. The Boston Marathon bombers didn’t attend mosques, and they never talked about their plans online. Similarly, September 11 attackers never used American mosques for recruitment or for any logistical support. In fact, since September 11, American mosques have taken extra steps to keep their communities intact, to denounce extremism, and to preach good citizenship.

Years were wasted by the NYPD and FBI efforts to link U.S. Muslims to terrorism—and so were millions of dollars, some of which were probably paid by Muslims in taxes. Trust between the city and Muslims, and among fellow worshippers at mosques, was shattered.

It is hard to rebuild trust. As New York takes steps to abolish surveillance on Muslims, it’s fair to wonder if a new secret spying operation might be launched now, only to be unveiled in 10 years. How can our own authorities learn to trust us overnight? And how can we ever trust them again?

The post I’m One of the Muslims the NYPD Spied On appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American English defines a whistle-blower as “A person who tells someone in authority about something they believe to be illegal that is happening, especially in a government department or a company.” The Whistleblower Protection Act applies to federal employees who disclose “illegal or improper government activities.” Those who argue that the contractor Ed Snowden is a whistle-blower, therefore, are deploying different definitions that are not currently rooted in law.

The 2001 Patriot Act lowered the barriers to legal surveillance by allowing the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to approve requests to suspend privacy rights. The surveillance court only hears arguments from the Justice Department and not opposing views, and Chief Justice Roberts has unilateral power to select its members. The surveillance court has been criticized from all points on the political spectrum, and one federal judge has deemed NSA collection of American telephone records to be likely unconstitutional. Another has ruled the other way, making it possible that the Supreme Court will ultimately have to rule on the issue, assuming the program isn’t suspended or materially altered earlier by the administration or Congress.

As of June 2013, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had received more than 33,900 surveillance requests and turned down just 11 of those. In July 2012, the Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, declassified government documents that showed the court had deemed some NSA data collection “unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.” The NSA claims to have addressed those concerns. We have no way of knowing whether or not they have actually done so: The chief judge of the surveillance court, Reggie B. Walton, has himself said that his body cannot verify whether the mistakes the NSA reports as unintentional were indeed that, or whether the agency has reported all of its violations.

Meanwhile, the broader societal migration to cloud computing is one of the underappreciated factors that motivated Snowden to reveal what the NSA was doing, and has generated so much of the ensuing apprehension about his revelations. Cloud computing is nothing new—anyone who searches on Google, uses a web-based email program, or works on shared documents via Dropbox has experienced the power of cloud computing. What is new in cloud computing is its sheer scale, as well as the acceleration of our transition away from a reliance on computing power and software applications that reside on hardware we own. With the cloud, all any user needs to access vast computing power is a web browser and a log-in password.

Cheap and powerful cloud computing potentially serves the interests of companies, consumers, and democracy alike. It also poses a great challenge. Whatever aspect of your life has been uploaded to the cloud does not currently have the same constitutional protection as the same information stored in a drawer in your home. The Fourth Amendment requires government to justify to a court why it has a compelling interest in your personal information. It protects the contents of your laptop from illegal search and seizure, but once you deposit something up in the cloud, you lose that protection. While there are some protections that treat e-mails like sealed letters, Fourth Amendment protection largely ends where virtual reality begins, since Americans are volunteering to share in this way, not being coerced to do so.

It initially looked as though tech companies were collaborating with the NSA by honoring requests for information, but we now know that the NSA also rummaged through Google’s and Yahoo’s fiber-optics links without consent. The NSA did not believe it needed company consent since the data was extracted from outside U.S. territory. Is that illegal under the Patriot Act and its 2011 extensions, which President Obama signed into law? That is a question for courts to decide.

What is clear is that the Patriot Act coupled with cloud computing has worrisome implications for the privacy rights of American citizens, America’s relationships with allies, and American commerce. Snowden’s revelations have undercut the world’s trust in American companies at the same time they are seeking to extend the range of their influence and appeal in the move to the cloud era.

The NSA is tasked with protecting the American people in a dangerous world to the full limits of the law. A panel of presidential advisors has urged President Obama to rein in NSA data mining, finding “persistent instances of noncompliance” but no “illegality or other abuse of authority.” The jury is therefore still out on whether the NSA has really “routinely and deliberately broken the law” as the concluding paragraph of the Times editorial argues, or instead whether the laws themselves are in need of an overhaul or further clarification.

According to the currently available evidence, Snowden is not yet a whistle-blower. Yet he doesn’t need to be a whistle-blower to have rendered a great public service by exposing the potential gap between current government practices—legal or illegal—and American values.

The post He’s No Whistle-Blower … For Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Documentarian and New America fellow Hao Wu explains to Anne-Marie Slaughter why the Chinese government has announced a recent slew of economic and social reforms. But he’s not sure they’ll live up to their transformative promise. Kevin Bankston, the new policy director at New America’s Open Technology Institute, and writer and Internet freedom activist Rebecca MacKinnon, a New America senior research fellow, join Slaughter to unpack the latest bill aimed at curbing NSA overreach, and expose its surprising opponents.

The post Reforms at Home, and Abroad appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.