#Define espionage how to#
We advise on how to avoid or deal with an approach if it happens. Often, it involves alerting someone to a foreign intelligence service's interest in recruiting them. We also investigate and disrupt the actions of foreign intelligence officers where these are damaging to our country’s interests. We seek to find those trying to pass sensitive UK information and equipment to other countries and to ensure they don't succeed. We are also heavily engaged in protective security work, which helps to frustrate both terrorism and espionage. MI5 has a branch dedicated to countering espionage and cyber threats. And the theft of classified technologies could enable foreign companies to copy them, threatening both national security and jobs in the UK.Ĭountering this threat is therefore a key priority for MI5.
Information on key services such as gas, oil and transport could enable terrorists to seriously damage these important economic targets. For instance, other countries are seeking technical details of weapons systems so that they can find ways of neutralising our military advantages. If this information is obtained by those with no right to access it, serious damage can be caused. Its sensitivity makes it necessary for us to protect it but also makes it attractive to spies. Classified information is kept secret in the first place because its disclosure might harm national security, jeopardise the country's economic well-being or damage international relations. In fact, it often helps us to build good relationships with other nations.Įspionage focuses on gathering non-public information through covert means. This type of work is not harmful to our national interests.
Foreign representatives thereby help their governments to shape their foreign, commercial and military policies. This enables them to monitor political, economic and military developments in their host country and brief their own governments. They use open sources such as the media, conferences, diplomatic events and trade fairs, and through open contact with host government representatives. The gathering of publicly available information is a routine activity of diplomatic staff, military attachés and trade delegations. lt may also involve seeking to influence decision-makers and opinion-formers to benefit the interests of a foreign power. This is not the same as espionage.Įspionage is the process of obtaining information that is not normally publicly available, using human sources (agents) or technical means (like hacking into computer systems). Most governments rely on a range of information being gathered to guide their decisions. Espionage against UK interests still continues and is potentially very damaging. The threat of espionage (spying) did not end with the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s. We do not think that Nixon knew what was going on at Watergate at the time it.
#Define espionage free#
Broder, who just won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote in the Washington Post (May 8): We could well discuss with our readers … why the same papers that have been so outraged by the threat to civil liberties resulting from the bugging of a party headquarters or the break-in at a psychiatrist’s office feel free themselves to print the transcript of secret grand jury testimony, regardless of the risk to the reputations of persons who may be mentioned in that non-adversary proceeding. Both the Watergate and the Ellsberg incidents are exhibitions of law-breaking, and nothing should be allowed to obscure this fact.Ĭolumnist David S. Whatever may have happened subsequently, we need to remind ourselves that Ellsberg admitted stealing and reproducing the Pentagon Papers and delivering them to the news media. What jars us is the selective morality some persons display in regard to the Watergate and Ellsberg cases.
If all these doors were opened, the Watergate scandal would no doubt rate only second billing.
But Watergate went far beyond this the illegal acts that the term now signifies must be condemned.īilly Graham in another Times piece commented that Watergate is “a symptom of the deeper moral crisis that affects society.” How right he is! Anyone at all familiar with the Washington scene knows there are skeletons stacked high in some congressional closets. Intelligence operations “are commonplace in political campaigns and usually include efforts to collect all published information about an opponent along with occasional efforts to obtain advance copies of speeches, travel schedules and the like,” wrote Seymour M.