ABSTRACT
Intelligence services stand at the forefront of the global war on terrorism, and nowhere more so than in Israel. Since 9/11, the intelligence services of many Western countries have been given significantly wider legal powers of investigation, often including the right to conduct deep incursions into personal privacy and limit individual freedoms, interrogate suspects and gather wide ranging information on large parts of the population. These powers can easily be abused, either under a misguided notion of national security or for personal gain. Laws and service regulations strive to limit those powers and prevent their misuse or abuse. However, in the vast scope of intelligence activities, there are many times when laws are not enough to guide or limit the activities of individual intelligence officers. This is where intelligence ethics come into play. Intelligence ethics provide a set of behavioural guidelines, based on certain beliefs and views regarding the role of intelligence in society and the interaction between citizen and intelligence officer. Ethics begin where written laws and regulations end and provide a set of ‘recommendations’ to guide the activities of intelligence officers. Unlike laws and service regulations, which are set on paper and enforced by investigatory powers and courts of law, ethics depend much more on the willingness of individual officers to comply and behave accordingly. Such ethics are also more open to interpretation. Thus ethics develop and evolve over time, reflecting changes in the internal and external environments of intelligence activities as well as in political culture and public security concerns. This chapter examines judicial and ethical aspects of intelligence counterterrorism activities in Israel. For decades a country under constant threat of terrorism, Israel developed an extensive intelligence community with wide legal and operational powers. The chapter examines the main components of intelligence ethics in Israel, explores their practical meaning and highlights specific incidents or operations which influenced the development of those ethics. The chapter begins by briefly outlining the judicial and administrative framework of Israel’s intelligence community and its counter-terrorism roles. It then focuses on several core elements of intelligence ethics in Israel, including reporting the truth, protection of sources, resisting internal cover-ups and individual moral character. The chapter also examines the influence of the Jewish religion on
intelligence ethics as well as briefly looking at the question of terrorist ethics, and concludes with an assessment of the role of ethics in curbing misuse of intelligence powers in counter-terrorism.
