Ethics and Security: Terrorism and Transnational Organized Crime

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This project introduces ethics research into the Global Uncertainties programme and adds value to on-going security research in the programme. The ethics research juxtaposes terrorism and transnational organized crime. On some understandings, terrorism is just a special kind of transnational organized crime, to be dealt with by established policing techniques within and between jurisdictions. Policing operations, at least in the West, are subject to stringent ethical and legal constraints, especially when directed at citizens of the jurisdiction being policed, and especially where the operations seek to prevent crime rather than to detain and try offenders guilty of an offence already committed. On other understandings, terrorism is a military threat, terrorists are combatants, and countering terrorism is literally a war. In a war, lethal force can legally and morally be used against combatants, and the penetration of military secrets by secret or underhand means is not typically considered immoral, because its target is an enemy rather than people who have the status of citizens. So it makes a great difference whether terrorism is seen as transnational organized crime that requires a policing response, or as a military threat. Even if it is seen as a policing matter, and especially as a preventive policing matter, there is considerable controversy over the means that can be used against it. Counter-terrorism involves mass searches at airports, secret wire-tapping, bugging, camera-surveillance and internet monitoring, questionable kinds of data-sharing, questionable kinds of detention even of people there is evidence against, and, at the extreme end, torture and extra-legal killing. Because of the way counter-terrorism affects a wide cross section of the public, some of the associated preventive policing techniques are more controversial than they would be if employed in a more targetted way against paedophiles, people traffickers; drug dealers; and weapons smugglers. Perhaps there is less scope, in policing non-terrorist, serious crime, for the use with bad consequences of ethnic and other stereotypes; and it may make a difference to that some kinds of transnational serious crime are much more prevalent, and harm many more people more frequently, than terrorism. Some activities associated in UK legislation with terrorism, such as glorifying it, are arguably protected by human rights to free speech and association; propaganda activities by the other side during a war, on the other hand, are routinely subverted by the other side, with no moral overtones. In short, the ethical differences between counter-terrorism and measures against (other kinds of) transnational organized crime are themselves of research interest. Identifying and explaining these differences, and suggesting how they should be reflected in public policy are important research tasks of this project. But the project also has a role in adding value to projects elsewhere in Global Uncertainties. These other projects sometimes aim at detecting patterns of behaviour that indicate possible criminal conspiracy, or even a tendency to violence. They also speed up identification of suspects. All of these kinds of research carry ethical risks, some of which may not be obvious to scientific researchers. The Leadership function of the project will involve interaction with other GU-funded projects for the purpose of identifying such risks and helping researchers to accommodate them, and even to write about them. Another function of the research will be to organize interactions between GU-supported researchers, companies in the UK and European security sector, and ethicists. Such interactions have been pioneered by the PI in previous European research.