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International Journal of Intelligence and

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The Citizen as "Intelligence Minuteman"

ALESSANDRO POLITI
Published online: 15 Dec 2010.

To cite this article: ALESSANDRO POLITI (2003) The Citizen as "Intelligence Minuteman", International
Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 16:1, 34-38, DOI: 10.1080/713830383

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 International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence, 16: 34–38, 2003
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DOI: 10.1080=08850600390121458

ALESSANDRO POLITI

The Citizen as ‘‘Intelligence Minuteman’’

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In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 airborne terrorist attacks on the

World Trade Center and the Pentagon, United States government officials
proposed the creation of Operation Terrorism Information and Prevention
System (TIPS) program. Civil libertarians of both the political Left and
Right expressed considerable concern about its perceived resemblance to the
neighborhood watch mechanisms of social control in totalitarian states. But
a democratic nation’s underlying cultural and ethical values help channel its
intelligence organizations in vastly different directions from those of
authoritarian states. Urging a democracy’s citizens to exercise caution, and
encouraging them to report suspicious behavior can be a valuable
self-defense mechanism when used to protect the public, rather than keep it
under surveillance for political purposes and social control. The issue
has been fervently discussed in many nations as part of the continuing
search for a sound relationship between intelligence and the public good.

THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATION

A major contradiction can be found in the relationship between
‘‘intelligence’’ and ‘‘ethics.’’ As the ongoing national legislative debate in

Dr. Alessandro Politi is perhaps the foremost proponent of ethical multinational

intelligence endeavors within the European Community. A personal adviser to
several Italian ministers of defense, he wrote large portions of that nation’s
most recent defense strategy, helped create Italy’s first open source
intelligence unit, and has served in various Western European Union positions
dealing with legal and ethical open source intelligence. In 1992, as one of
several international representatives at the first conference on open source
intelligence, he coined the term ‘‘intelligence minuteman.’’ Dr. Politi
presented an earlier version of this article at a seminar on ‘‘intelligence as
institutional communication,’’ conducted by Professor Mario Caligiuri at the
University of Calabria, Cosenza, Italy, 11 February 2002.

34 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE

 THE CITIZEN AS ‘‘INTELLIGENCE MINUTEMAN’’ 35

Italy over the Frattini reform proposals has shown, intelligence officers need
a legal framework in order to avoid prosecution when they commit, during
their missions, some types of crime. The cultural foundations of current
Italian legislation avoid extreme authorizations, such as the license to kill
summum ius, summa iniuria (the extreme judgment is the supreme breach of
the law), although political necessities could at times strongly nudge
responsible officials toward this solution to vexing problems.
The important thing to consider in exploring the link between intelligence
and ethics is the source of the craft, that is, the always ambiguous and yet
never ending relationship between ethics and politics.
Italians have the privilege of becoming immediately absorbed, almost
instinctively, in Niccolo Machiavelli’s lesson about politics, without some
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of the complications introduced by the successive Protestant debate or

present in the Anglican approach to politics, found in Great Britain and
much of the rest of Western Europe. According to Machiavelli, politics is
c l e a r l y di s t i n c t f r o m t h e w i d e m o r a l s p h e r e , a n d , t o b o r r o w a
Clausewitzian metaphor, has its own moral grammar.
Nevertheless, Italians are often victims of the vulgarized version of
Machiavelli’s thought. ‘‘The ends justify the means,’’ which is, in reality, a
brilliant falsifying shortcut of his original precept, ‘‘Let the means be
adequate to your ends.’’
Machiavelli did not dream of abolishing the moral horizon from his political
view because he knew all too well that a self-contained moral grammar does
not make a moral logic. Politics has practical priorities, but invariably needs
a vision, that is, moral values, if good governance is to be produced. In the
past, good governance distinguished an illuminated autocracy from tyranny,
and today makes the difference between a democracy and a kleptocratic
demagoguery with an illusory parliamentary image.
Understandably, tolerance and moral relativism are not identical, nor is it
impossible to distinguish good from bad, although morals can pose dilemmas
as difficult as those encountered in politics.
Returning to intelligence, its definition in the Italian Strategic Defense
Review’s ‘‘2001: New Forces for a New Century’’ should be analyzed:

216. Intelligence is a non-conventional instrument used in international

relations to safeguard and foster national interests as a whole, also
within alliances. Intelligence is basically the product of a thorough effort
of collection, processing and dissemination of value-added information
that is considered to be relevant to the government’s political decisions
and to the country’s security.

The expression ‘‘non-conventional’’ means something ‘‘not submitted to

covenants,’’ a rough play unconstrained in principle by rules. In practice,
unwritten rules do exist among countries — friends, and in many cases,

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 36 ALESSANDRO POLITI

hostile — which rule out as politically negative or acceptable a number of

actions. That most limitations do not stem from ethical considerations, but
from political ones, can perhaps be disputed, with the important exception
where political and cultural friendships are involved. The furor caused by
Israeli Intelligence operations on United States soil, as in the Jonathan
Pollard spy case, or the quiet resentment nurtured by certain U.S.
operations against close allies are good illustrations of this moral tinge on
the less visible side of politics.
And within each intelligence establishment, one of the first things
hammered into a recruit’s mind is a moral code, a special version of the
Ten Commandments, encapsulated in the old phrase ‘‘Intelligence is a dirty
affair, done by gentlemen,’’ and by Jove, gentlemen and ladies who have
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moral values.
The fact that intelligence is, at least in the overwhelming majority of
democracies, under the rule of law shows that politics, ethics, and
intelligence may be an odd, but not an improbable trio. Certainly, some
political thinkers believe that laws are primarily the embodiment of
political interests. Indeed, everyone who has followed a legislative process
or some political activity will have examples aplenty, but the devil of
ethics, chased from the door, comes back through the chimney: laws will
not be obeyed if they are not deemed legitimate. Legitimacy is not simply
a validating mechanism; it makes a rule accepable because it feels right,
that is, moral.

AN INSPIRATION
The mysterious image of the ‘‘intelligence minuteman’’ first sprang to my mind
more than a decade ago during an 8 a.m. working breakfast during the 1992
conference of Open Source Solutions in Virginia while discussing with its
director, Robert David Steele, the link between intelligence, open source
intelligence (OSINT), and citizens. (The Minuteman was, of course,
prominent in the American revolution against the British, forming the
citizens’ first line of force against the colonizers. The missile named the
‘‘Minuteman’’ was a backbone of the United States intercontinental
ballistic missile capacity during the Cold War against the Soviet Union.)
The word ‘‘minuteman’’ is nearly untranslatable outside the United States
due to its cultural and historical antecedents, and almost equally difficult to
explain. What is self-evident to a historically aware U.S. citizen because of its
heritage must be defined in another language. But the term can be readily
applied to open source intelligence.
The easy part comes in stating that OSINT solves the moral dilemma: ‘‘It
is actionable information ethically and legally acquired.’’ Because the
intelligence minuteman has roots in this context, the case should be closed,

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 THE CITIZEN AS ‘‘INTELLIGENCE MINUTEMAN’’ 37

with a Harry Potter–like white magic. But not for my fellow Italians, who
have, among other things, nearly three millennia of logical and legal
arguing in their cultural tapestry.

THE OSINT FACTOR

In squaring the problem, this observation is relevant: collaborating with state
authorities, especially in the field of passing information, has always evoked
the idea of delation, that is, secret denunciation, spying, betraying—in every
country, not just Italy or Southern Italy.
The factors behind this rooted cultural perception are long to explain, but
it is still difficult to affirm that collaboration with the authorities to help solve
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a crime (particularly a serious crime) is morally reprehensible. Without

doubt, it can be dangerous, but it is the duty of a good citizen.
But the question here is not about criminal information; it instead involves
knowledge-sharing between the private and public sectors. It pertains to the
voluntary, generous contribution of data, time, and energy to the common
good, not only that of the local community or the country, but possibly
even at the regional and global levels.
Would the sharing with government officials of OSINT useful in
facilitating a humanitarian mission, or avoiding a genocide, or neutralizing
a violent ideology at the cultural level, be immoral? No, for in a globalized
and nonmaterial economy, knowledge is a strong currency, just as it is in
secular caritative and voluntary assistance projects. The knowledge or
intelligence volunteer has the same dignity as that of a donor, an ethic
bank, or, in the Islamic culture, a money lender.
Italy’s strong political and religious volunteering tradition offers splendid
examples in the nonprofit and nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector,
both secular and Roman Catholic. The Sant’Egidio community, an NGO
offering an impressive example of unofficial, ‘‘light cavalry’’ diplomacy,
could not operate without ‘‘knowledge volunteers.’’
Part of Italy’s Risorgimento (the forging of the nation and its liberation
from foreign oppression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) was
done through the courageous volunteering, in the armed columns of
Giuseppe Garibaldi and in the insurrectional cells of Giuseppe Mazzini, of
people from throughout the Italian peninsula. In fact, volunteers from all
of Europe went to Italy to fight for national liberation ideals, and
Garibaldi himself fought gallantly and magnanimously for the French, his
longtime enemies, when they were defeated by the Prussians in 1870.

THE KNOWLEDGE VOLUNTEER

A strong temptation is to translate the American ‘‘intelligence minuteman’’
into the Italian ‘‘garibaldino dell’intelligencia.’’ Though historically correct,

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 38 ALESSANDRO POLITI

it is slightly influenced by political hues. The Garibaldi campaign in southern

Italy is still remembered as a great adventure, quickly drowned by social and
political repression engineered by the king of Piedmont. Garibaldini were
called Communist partisans during World War II, and Garibaldi was the
electoral symbol of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the hotly
contested election campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s. Alla garibaldina
means done in an expeditious, bordering the approximate, yet effective, way.
Will the more globalized no-logo dell’intelligence fare better? The term
expresses more clearly the voluntary, independent contribution, and less
the patriotic undertone of ‘‘minuteman.’’
Yet another important aspect of the intelligence or knowledge volunteer
can be highlighted. This person is the elementary cell of a knowledge-based
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social fabric, leading slowly but surely, to a smart country in a smart

Europe (or elsewhere). Reforms in public instruction will come and go, but
these individuals are the living example that learning and sharing, alone
and separately, are not only useful, but helpful to citizenship and
democracy. They can also lead to a better world society than the one that
prevails today.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENCE