Can Spies Be Ethical?

In an Age of Terrorists, Agents for Liberal Democracies Must Balance the Need to Stop Bad Actors With Moral Responsibility

Codes of ethics help define our expectations of the professions. Teachers should not seduce their students; fund managers should not embezzle clients’ money; doctors should not harm patients. So too, we need rules for spies: Of course we want our intelligence officers to act on our behalf to gather essential secret information to keep us safe, but there are also things we don’t want them to do.

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, …

The (Actual) Communist Agents Who Lurked Among Us

American Fears About Soviet Spycraft Never Seemed to Match Reality

Russian spies held a morbid fascination in the minds of Americans dating back to the Red Scare in 1919, following the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of the Communist International, …

I’m One of the Muslims the NYPD Spied On

New York’s Anti-Terrorism Surveillance Program Not Only Wasted Money. It Also Robbed People Like Me of Our Trust in American Government.

For many years, local and federal law enforcement agencies spied on Muslims and mosques in the U.S., hoping to find bad guys before they could commit acts of terrorism. But …

He’s No Whistle-Blower … For Now

It’s Not Yet Clear Whether Edward Snowden Revealed Illegal Behavior

Edward Snowden is many things to many people, and in recent days The New York Times and The Guardian have favorably editorialized about the overdue debate he has initiated. Rightly …

Reforms at Home, and Abroad

Hao Wu on the Promise of Transformation in China and Kevin Bankston and Rebecca MacKinnon on Curbing the NSA

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 …