Can intelligence agencies (CIA, Europol) use 'unethical' tactics to nab terrorists?

Great Debates
1

I posted this in GD since there is obviously no factual answer. Also aside from being granted extrajudicial powers, this question is concerned with whether they would use such tactics.

In our post 9/11 world, we know for a fact that international intelligence agencies have gone into override with intelligence gathering. Apparently, dozens of attacks are prevented in Western Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Russia (though that can be disputed).

Looking at the history of governments and their specifically the US, no one should be surprised by any unethical actions that are leaked in future decades. We know torture is in Guantanamo Bay for prisoners who haven’t gone through any legal process in any country and some of who are completely innocent, drone strikes kill innocent civilians as shown by Wiki Leaks etc.

What I’m really interested is how often the CIA nabs terrorists with 'social engineering methods. Rather than using physical methods (arrests, executions with chemical/biological means), or electronic methods (hacking electronic devices, wiretap), they get a trusted individual to befriend a suspected criminal and gather intelligence.

Example:* a gender rights terrorist who is part of an extremist form of mens rights activism (20 people). They are plotting to plant a suicide bomber a court in the US where a female teacher is being accused of having sex with a younger boy but getting a light sentence in a few years. They are spread across England, Belgium and New York. Europol hears about this but due to their secretive and paranoid nature, cannot get anything from tapping their communications. No matter how long they listen, the men know they are being watched and are extremely cautious. However, they have heard from reading their manifestos that these men believe that they will get young adult virgin lesbians after blowing themselves up.

Europol shares this with the Americans and they decide what to do.
*

Knowing that they don’t have concrete evidence that they are planning attacks but are certain that they have every intention, would the CIA/FBI try and infiltrate the group with two female young agents befriending a member. The hope would be that the group member would be seduced and his defenses would drop thereby revealing the plot.

Do you believe such tactics would ever be used by any intelligence agency?

2

How is it unethical to infiltrate a group and befriend the members to get them to tell you about their plans?

Regards,
Shodan

3

The honey trap technique? Hasn’t it been used for millennia?

4

I suppose it could be a Julian Assange scenario; you get a female agent to befriend a terrorist member, they have some fucked up sexual fetishes which are taken advantage of by the agent (i.e have sex with underage teen girl who poses as the sister of the agent).

Like with all sane terrorists, suspicions comes quickly when the female agent starts asking subtle questions, they realize this was probably too good to be true and they’ve divulged a bit too much but not enough for a conviction. However they’ve done something illegal which is the beginning of their end.

Now law enforcement have a sideways entrance into a warrant to arrest for defilement of a minor and search all electronic devices of that group member hoping to expose the terrorist plot.

A bit too much don’t you think? Like To Catch A Predator

5

Is it still used frequently?

6

No way to answer definitively, but I’m sure it’s as popular as ever.

7

This. I don’t want us to use unethical tactics, which to me amounts to burn the village in order to save it, but infiltrating a suspected group??? I have exactly zero issue with this, even if it turns out that the suspects were as innocent as lambs.

Regarding another point you made, I’m not sure about the reality of the plots that intelligence and police services are supposedly foiling all the time. I strongly suspect that most of them are people who vaguely talk about doing something bad on some Jihadist website, as opposed to actual plans being implemented. Not that they shouldn’t pay attention to such vague talks, but I don’t think they’re defusing nearly as many actual, real, threats as they say.

8

That’s more or less how Alwan and Hammadi (of Bowling Green “massacre” fame) were caught - by interacting with an FBI “confidential human source”. See Former Iraqi Terrorists Living in Kentucky Sentenced for Terrorist Activities | OPA | Department of Justice

9

I can’t even see how infiltrating a group by becoming friends some someone is in any way unethical.

I do have some reservations about ordering someone to have a sexual relationship with someone in order to to infiltrate a group: not because the target of the sexual advances is being treated unfairly, but because the government would be essentially ordering an employee of ours to become a prostitute in the name of national security. Sure, we order soliders to kill in the name of our country, but telling someone they should seek to have sex with an odious person because patriotism crosses a line with me for some reason.

10

A few years back I read a memoir by former CIA agent Lindsay Moran called Blowing My Cover, about her training as a clandestine officer and some of her work in the Balkans. She wrote that she had been disappointed to learn that the real work of being a spy didn’t involve much in the way of daring capers but was mostly just trying to befriend people who seemed like they might have useful information and then manipulating or bribing them into revealing it. An example from IIRC her training was that if a foreign contact had a child with a medical problem, the spy might suggest that their cooperation could lead to the child getting superior treatment in the US.

It sounded like the CIA does this sort of thing all the time. Within the realm of espionage I doubt it’s considered unethical. It’s not honest, but it’s not a spy’s job to be honest. Rather the opposite, in fact.

11

Regarding law enforcement engaging in sex for King and Country: I read an interesting non-fiction account of a DEA(?) agent forming an undercover connection with a major Asian drug smuggler. Stumbling-block came when the agent was invited to meet for a party overseas where he knew he’d be expected to fraternize with hookers — but he refused to be unfaithful to his wife.

IIRC, the solution was for the wife to join the undercover team! The drug smuggler happily changed the overseas party to became a sort of honeymoon celebration for the couple.

12

Considering the fact that the CIA rendition people to torture chambers I would imagine very little is off-limits.

Look up Cofer Black.

Because you are breaking trust.
Narks and informers are rarely considered role-models, however necessary they are: to go up to people greasily rubbing one’s hands and promising one is on their side to coax out their secrets is a considerable step lower.

13

Anna Chapman is pretty recent.

14

Well, I can’t see she did much.

The worst being:

In 2012, FBI counter-intelligence chief Frank Figliuzzi said that Chapman almost caught a senior member of U.S. President Barack Obama’s cabinet in a honey trap operation. This was reported as a primary motive behind the government’s action to round up the ten-person spy ring in which she was a member. The plan reportedly would have involved Chapman seducing her target before extracting information from him or her.[34] Subsequent reporting suggested that these initial reports were sensational misinterpretation. Officials from the US Department of Justice claimed that the FBI’s concern was that another of the alleged spies, Cynthia Murphy, “had been in contact with a fundraiser and ‘personal friend’ of Hillary Clinton”.

Which is thin stuff.

This bit is hilarious:
Chapman pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. Attorney General.

15

They tracked down Bin Lade, in part by pretending to be medical volunteers.

That was mighty damned unethical.

16

I am having trouble with this question because ‘CIA’ and ‘ethical’ are almost oxymorons. They can and have done whatever they wanted and almost nothing is out of bounds.

It would require several books to explain it all but it is well documented. This isn’t some whack-ass conspiracy theory. Much of it is mainstream news that some people have apparently forgotten.

Search for:
Iran-Contra Affair
United Fruit Company CIA
MK-ULTRA
Operation Mockingbird
CIA Drug Running in LA
Bay of Pigs

Those are just for starters. The CIA in particular has gotten out of hand many times before. Even senior politicians get scared of them sometimes, not because they are some super-elite spy team, but because it is like having a retarded, violent uncle over for Thanksgiving. You never know what they are going to do but you are the one that has to deal with the consequences. They tried to recruit my father to go to Central America when I was young because he is a firearms expert. It was some half-assed mission to train revolutionaries. He turned it down which is probably for the best because very few of their Keystone Cops capers in that region ever worked out as planned.

17

Femmejean, you appear to have an unusual sense of what is “unethical” when it comes to going after violent criminals. Do you really think it’s “unethical” to lie to such people?

Also, what is “ethical” isn’t a stand-alone thing. Ethics are related to the standards and principles of the people who are enforcing them (or not).

As for what intelligence services and other police groups HAVE done, in attempts to protect us in advance, or to respond to attacks and crimes, there are tons of things that we could point to, and talk about.

Obvious ones include that some police who are working to infiltrate and put an end to drug pushing groups, will take illegal drugs themselves as a part of getting the job done.
The best example of genuinely unethical behavior by a police group, was back when they were trying to catch Delorean dealing drugs to try to rescue his business. In that case, they were fine, right up until he decided to back out, before doing anything that they could actually jail him for. Instead of backing away and continuing to monitor things, the police switched to blackmailing him until he DID actually commit a criminal act. That’s why he got off.

There have been similar instances in the past, where FBI informants joined protest groups, and instead of just observing them, actually instigated criminal actions themselves. Again, entirely unethical, because the crimes would not have occurred at all, had the FBI member not caused them to occur.

18

Infiltrating potentially criminal groups with undercover agents is nothing new, nor is it inherently unethical, unless and until it becomes incitement/entrapment, i.e., getting people to do what they would not have done without the infiltrator’s encouragement.

We’ve had issues in the UK from overenthusiastic use of undercover police infiltrators into what were (if you weren’t a paranoid) peaceful environmental groups (but committed to civil disobedience). Some of them were found to have been getting close to or even overstepping the line when it came to incitement; and more were caught out developing relationships, even fathering children, in their assumed identities, even though they already had a family in their real identity, which raises no end of issues for the women they seduced.

Gathering intelligence, and evidence of criminal activity, is one thing. Actively seeking to steer whatever criminal activity someone might potentially engage in is something else.

19

I’d barely heard of Europol mentioned in the OP, and would have probably confused it with Interpol, however although it’s been around since 1998,

The agency has no executive powers, and its officials are not entitled to conduct investigations in the member states or to arrest suspects.

I’m gonna think their capacity for evil is limited.
As for delegated evil, as in the OP, ‘Europol shares this with the Americans and they decide what to do’ sharing information is not wrong unless one knows the receiver will act on it to commit a crime.

Even if, and despite the fact that, Britain and nearly all the European countries are America’s bitches *, they would be pretty well bound to share anti-terror and anti-crime information anyway.

  • Bitches more in the Soviet Criminal sense than the girl dog sense.
20

I want to mention a couple of dynamics that are essential, though tangential to this.

One, is that there is an INHERENT ethical conflict component to ALL governing. It is logically impossible to obey all laws and principles, when dealing with people who “misbehave.” After all, if no one ever stole anything, there would be no need for a law against stealing. And the only way to preserve the freedom of one part of a society, is to limit the freedom of anyone who’s activities threaten that freedom.

It is inherently unethical for government to govern, essentially.

Another, is that the PROBLEM of unethical government behavior, isn’t the fact that it takes place, per se. As is clear above, it’s going to take place. The PROBLEM, comes with how the government deals with the necessary unethical activities, in detail. The government has to be aware of exactly how far beyond it’s official boundaries it is going, so that the unethical behavior does not defeat the reason for allowing it.

In addition, it is inherent to making such excursions, that they not be openly admitted, because that would involve declaring the crossed ethical boundary to be void. That is the real CORRECT reason why such actions be conducted in secret; NOT primarily to protect either the people doing it, or the people ordering it. In fact, it is when the reason for the secrecy IS just to protect those responsible, that the delicate balance is overturned.