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Past Event
Seminar

"Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence," with Sir David Omand

RSVP Required Harvard Faculty, Fellows, Staff, and Students

The Intelligence Project will host a book talk seminar with Sir David Omand, Former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator and former Director of GCHQ, on Tuesday, March 27th from 3:30-4:30pm in the Malkin Penthouse. 

Refreshments will be served. Harvard IDs checked at the door. Please register below. 

Date: Time: - Location: Malkin Penthouse, 4th Floor
Sir David Omand at Chatham House

About

Intelligence agencies provide critical information to national security and foreign policy decision makers, but spying also poses inherent dilemmas for liberty, privacy, human rights, and diplomacy. Please join Sir David Omand as he discusses his new book, Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence, in which he and co-author Mark Phythian explore how to strike a balance between necessary intelligence activities and protecting democratic values by developing a new framework of ethics.

Biography

Sir David Omand GCB was the first UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”. He served for seven years on the Joint Intelligence Committee. He was Permanent Secretary of the Home Office from 1997 to 2000, and before that Director of GCHQ (the UK Sigint Agency). Previously, in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy, he was particularly concerned with long term strategy, with the British military contribution in restoring peace in the former Yugoslavia and the recasting of British nuclear deterrence policy at the end of the Cold War. He was Principal Private Secretary to the Defence Secretary during the Falklands conflict, and served for three years in NATO Brussels as the UK Defence Counsellor.

Sir David is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London and at PSIA Sciences Po in Paris. He is the Senior Independent Director of Babcock International Group plc and a senior adviser to Paladin Capital Group, investing in the cybersecurity sector. He is the author of Securing the State (CUP and Hurst) 2010 and (with Professor Mark Phythian) Principled Spying: the Ethics of Secret Intelligence (Georgetown University Press and OUP, 2018).

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