ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the big data landscape impacts ethics in intelligence. It reveals how the big data landscape is changing the established ethical boundaries of intelligence. This includes highlighting the discussion by intelligence practitioners of the various barriers to adoption that big data and automation face when considered in intelligence contexts – and where their use is infeasible. In the second section, this chapter considers the ethical dimension of big data in intelligence that has not previously been studied. It considers ‘ethics at scale’ – that some of the decisions around ethics are being automated and applied at a large scale in social contexts, by private companies, which would represent a considerable ethical dilemma if applied to intelligence activities. The third section of this chapter examines ethics in intelligence, which includes consideration of bias and emphasises that intelligence practitioners should be aware of the difference between cognitive bias and data bias, the intelligence challenges of incomplete data sets and the bias of intelligence collection itself.
