ABSTRACT
Secret intelligence is widely accepted as essential to the tasks and a legitimate function of the nation-state, indeed one on which its legitimacy ultimately rests. The very purpose of acquiring intelligence is to improve governmental decision-making by reducing ignorance about the activities of those who mean harm, the dictators, terrorists, cyber attackers, narcotics gangs, pirates, people traffickers, and other serious criminals. The historical tradition for intelligence agencies has been consequentialist, justifying to themselves and their political masters the ethical rightness of their actions by the harms that their interventions prevented. The best that could be done would be to seek more detail, for example in published National Security Strategies, of what the priority threats are that justify intelligence capability. The secrecy that attaches to intelligence is at the root of a number of the ethical tensions that intelligence practice generates in liberal democratic contexts.
