ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on the argument that the use of intelligence in security policy is rarely predicated upon the need to find out the truth about events (and much less any comprehensive truth about the conflict that intelligence collection arises from or is intended to prevent). It is, rather, predicated upon a rights game, where the protection of a set of rights (arising from sovereignty, citizenship or other forms of belonging to a political or moral community) is the real objective. Such a shift in focus, from finding out the truth to using what appears to be the truth in order to advance competing sets of rights, allows controversial methods of intelligence collection, processing and operational use to purport to a moral justification where, if the focus was the truth, no such justification would be possible. This chapter thus deals with an epistemology of intelligence ethics, showing that such ethics will depend on the type of epistemology projected onto intelligence work.
