ETHICS AS AN ELEMENT OF PROFESSIONAL SUBCULTURE IN THE INTELIGENCE PROFESSION

Abstract

Within an institutional context, ethics is closely related to individual and personal performance. The current proliferation of intelligence activities has arisen as a reaction to the growing threats by organised crime and terrorism. However, the use of intelligence–led policing and criminal justice policies more generally brings with it an inevitable threat to the core civic and human rights which were once fundamental to the very concept of liberal democracy. Thus intelligence ethics has established itself as a new, dynamic field of professional ethics. The research within this new discipline revolves primarily around issues facing the intelligence community as a particular professional group in the modern society; its onus is largely on the theoretical development of a “just intelligence”, which is somewhat equivalent to efforts in the ethics of war to construct a theory of “just war”.

Professionals in the security sector tend to enjoy a higher degree of autonomy than most other public servants. A discretionary operational decision–making emphasizes the need for high quality training of intelligence officers. They need to be able to conceptually understand ethical issues as they arise in the course of their daily work and to interpret them adequately in order to make quality discretionary decisions. This means that intelligence professionals cannot be predominantly drawn from the “rank–and–file” of the security profession, especially from the police ranks without a critical assessment and a recruitment discriminacy.

The paper discusses not only the potential of intelligence–based policies to address organized crime, but also their potential to undermine the quality of life in a democratic society. The author argues that one way to address the need to balance intelligence–led criminal justice as a tool to fight crime on the one hand, and the need to use it scrupulously, on the other, is to pay far greater attention to a career development of intelligence officers, especially in the field of criminal intelligence, where theoretical education, the learning of theoretical thinking and conceptual skills are absolutely critical.