Too many secrets? When should the intelligence community be allowed to keep secrets?

In recent years, revelations regarding reports of torture by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and the quiet growth of the National Security Agency’s pervasive cyber-surveillance system have brought into doubt the level of trust afforded to the intelligence community. The question of its trustworthiness requires determining how much secrecy it should enjoy and what mechanisms should be employed to detect and prevent future abuse. My argument is not a call for complete transparency, however, as secret intelligence does play an important and ethical role in society. Rather, I argue that existing systems built on a prioritization of democratic assumptions are fundamentally ill-equipped for dealing with the particular challenge of intelligence secrecy. As the necessary circle of secrecy is extended, political actors are insulated from the very public gaze that ensures they are working in line with the political community’s best interests. Therefore, a new framework needs to be developed, one that this article argues should be based on the just war tradition, where the principles of just cause, legitimate authority, last resort, proportionality, and discrimination are able to balance the secrecy that the intelligence community needs in order to detect and prevent threats with the harm that too much or incorrect secrecy can cause to people

Spatial Design for Multicultural Online Game Environments

Current gaming technologies enable players from different cultures to communicate and participate in gameplay within a single game environment. A player from one culture may now inhabit a three-dimensional game environment developed by designers from a different culture. These game environments bypass geographic and cultural boundaries and question differences in Eastern and Western gameplay preferences recognized by the games industry. This paper discusses the effect of cultural knowledge on the spatial design of three-dimensional game environments. A new methodology for the comparative analysis of the design of three-dimensional game environments is established considering cultural models as applied to design thinking. Based on spatial analysis it offers game designers and researchers metrics correlated to human way-finding in the real world that are directly relevant to the forms of game play in these environments. The initial analysis of internationally popular, and culturally specific, game environments indicate areas where cultural differences may be considered through spatial considerations within a design methodology. Recognized cognitive differences between Eastern and Western cultures and the interpretation of the two dimensional visual field are considered within findings that determine the use of spatial metrics is a methodology that can be used by design researchers and game designers as a tool set within the design cycle of online multicultural three-dimensional game environments

Can AI weapons make ethical decisions?

The ability of machines to make truly independent and autonomous decisions is a goal of many, not least of military leaders who wish to take the human out of the loop as much as possible, claiming that autonomous military weaponry—most notably drones—can make decisions more quickly and with greater accuracy. However, there is no clear understanding of how autonomous weapons should be conceptualized and of the implications that their “autonomous” nature has on them as ethical agents. It will be argued that autonomous weapons are not full ethical agents due to the restrictions of their coding. However, the highly complex machine-learning nature gives the impression that they are making their own decisions and creates the illusion that their human operators are protected from the responsibility of the harm they cause. Therefore, it is important to distinguish between autonomous AI weapons and an AI with autonomy, a distinction that creates two different ethical problems for their use. For autonomous weapons, their limited agency combined with machine-learning means their human counterparts are still responsible for their actions while having no ability to control or intercede in the actual decisions made. If, on the other hand, an AI could reach the point of autonomy, the level of critical reflection would make its decisions unpredictable and dangerous in a weapon

Going dark : anonymising technology in cyberspace

Anonymising technologies are cyber-tools that protect people from online surveillance, hiding who they are, what information they have stored and what websites they are looking at. Whether it is anonymising online activity through ‘TOR’ and its onion routing, 256-bit encryption on communications sent or smart phone auto-deletes, the user’s identity and activity is protected from the watchful eyes of the intelligence community. This represents a clear challenge to intelligence actors as it prevents them access to information that many would argue plays a vital part in locating and preventing threats from being realised. Moreover, such technology offers more than ordinary information protections as it erects ‘warrant-proof’ spaces, technological black boxes that no matter what some authority might deem as being legitimately searchable is protected to the extent that there are very limited or non-existent means of forcing oneself in. However, it will be argued here that not only is using such anonymising technology and its extra layer of protection people’s right, but that it is ethically mandatory. That is, due to the en masse surveillance—from both governments and corporations—coupled with people’s limited awareness and ability to comprehend such data collections, anonymising technology should be built into the fabric of cyberspace to provide a minimal set of protections over people’s information, and in doing so force the intelligence community to develop more targeted forms of data collection

An ethical framework for hacking operations

In recent years the power and reach of prominent hacker groups such as Anonymous and LulzSec has been clearly demonstrated. However, in a world where hackers are able to wield significant online power, can they do so ethically as legitimate agents? To answer this question this paper will develop an ethical framework based on the premise that hackers have exhibited instances where they have acted to protect people from harm at a time when there was no one else to do so. At its core this paper will argue that political hacking can be justified when it is done to protect the vital interests of oneself or others. Moreover, it will also argue that just because hackers are outside the state does not automatically discount them as ethical actors and that when the state fails to protect people – whether it is due to a lack of ability, political will or because the state is the source of the threat – hackers can fill the void. In order to achieve this, first it is necessary to highlight the space for hackers to operate; second, guide hacker activity by creating an ethical framework detailing what actions are justified towards what end; third, to offer mechanisms that can aid in reaching these ethically justified decisions; and as a result, inform further ethical debates on how to react to these political hackers. This means that the framework can be used to both justify and condemn hacking depending on the circumstances, allowing those on the outside to distil and evaluate a political hack, both past and present, while guiding hacker collectives by providing clearer ethical tools for determining the appropriate agendas and methods

Intelligence and the just war tradition : the need for a flexible ethical framework

Intelligence is a varied set of activities that makes examining it as a single entity very difficult. By evaluating the various practices the intelligence community uses in terms of the level of “harm” they cause and using the just war tradition as a means of determining when these harms are justified we can start to make evaluations and judgements of its activity. This chapter will argue that while a direct translation of the just war tradition might be difficult to apply to intelligence, there are a number of underlying ethical contributions that can help us better understand when intelligence should be licensed and when it should be limited. This will involve understanding the key contributions of the just war tradition in order to develop a graduated form for intelligence activity and applying it to some of the key debates on collection, analysis and operative activity. Moreover, not only does the just war tradition allow for understanding when intelligence is justified, but it can also help in evaluating and shaping intelligence-related phenomenon such as what the relevant oversight mechanisms should be and the ethical justification for national security whistleblowing

An ethical framework for economic intelligence

It can be argued that intelligence activity has ethical value through its important role in detecting, preventing, and countering threats that would cause harm to the political community and its members. What has been relatively overlooked, however, is the potentially (un)ethical role of intelligence in the economic sphere—that is, whether secret intelligence acts of economic espionage and economic covert action can be used against another (potentially aggressive) state’s economy or economic actors as a means of protecting one’s own economic, social, and military security. Economic intelligence works to create a competitive economic or political advantage, but this can cause harm that is more likely to be disproportionate and inflicted on those who have done nothing to warrant it. The harms caused by economic intelligence can be widely spread across society and against those who are unjustified targets. To account for this, additional care needs to be given to questions of proportionality and discrimination

Extraordinary rendition: expanding the circle of blame in international politics

The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been abducting individuals from across the world and flying them to other states with the knowledge, and even intent, that they are tortured in order to collect intelligence. Placing blame on the USA, or at least the CIA, in this case is therefore unproblematic. The capture, transportation or housing of an individual with the intent to inflict harm means that the USA has placed itself as a key actor and so can be directly blamed. However, claims can also been made against other states who aided in these rendition programmes by sharing intelligence, by allowing the use of their facilities or simply by being aware and not acting. Ascribing blame to these states is difficult as their involvement is often unclear, unnecessary or far removed from the activity itself. To better understand their involvement this paper will argue that complicity, and therefore blame, should not be considered so strictly, and that instead it is better to think of a spectrum of involvement. This allows a more flexible understanding of blame, making it possible to evaluate those who are more removed from the torture and in doing so argue that more states should be implicated than originally thought

Torture-Lite: An Ethical Middle-Ground?

Torture-lite has been advanced as a new form of interrogation that raises the prospect of offering a more ethical way of colleting the intelligence needed to protect the state. However, this paper will argue that there can be no such thing as torture-lite as this misunderstands what interrogational torture is in the first place. Interrogational torture is a form of behavioural modification that relies on breaking the individual and conditioning their responses. Torture-lite would never be able to create the self-betraying effect necessary for cases such as the ticking time bomb scenario without crossing over into the higher harms caused by full torture, and is unable to force the individual to provide the required information to serve as the good in the consequentialist argument