Intelligence decisions affect people’s rights, community safety, and trust in institutions. Oversight and governance are important, but they cannot replace the daily judgement calls that professionals make. Having clear ways to apply ethics in everyday practice helps teams make better decisions, show accountability, and maintain public confidence.
To support this, the Institute for Intelligence Professionalisation is launching a new series: Ethical Intelligence. Every second Thursday, we will publish an article with practical routines that put ethical principles into action. These include checklists, templates, and methods for recording reasoning. The aim is to help intelligence professionals raise standards without adding unnecessary complexity.
The series is written by Roseleen Woodman, an intelligence and security professional with more than fifteen years of experience in the Australian Army, the Western Australian Government, and the private sector. Her work focuses on ethical leadership, insider-risk governance, and tools that help teams turn values into habits. She created this series to share methods she wished she had earlier in her career. These are practical routines that hold up under pressure and make it easier to remain accountable.
In the piece that follows, Roseleen introduces herself and sets out why she believes ethics in practice is central to effective intelligence work.
This work matters to every intelligence professional, regardless of rank or role. Analysts need clear ways to state confidence and caveats. Collectors need purpose-binding and proportionate collection. Team leads need tools for dissent, reversibility, and auditing. Executives need decisions they can defend months later, when facts evolve and memories fade. The series is written to meet each of those needs, using concrete behaviours and lightweight artefacts which raise standards without slowing operations.
Converting theory to practice sits at the heart of the series. Each article distils a principle into a small routine, a checklist, and a template you can lift straight into a brief, a collection request or an assessment. You will see decision logs that make reasoning reconstructible, dissent passes that surface the strongest counter-case, reversibility checks that design exits before scale, and purpose-bound data requests with access limits, deletion dates, and renewal tests. These tools help build a profession where ethical judgement is visible in the work, not just in policy.
Across the series, we will focus on the essentials of decision integrity: minimum-viable oversight and authority maps, explainability and model lineage, and AI guardrails with real kill switches. We will apply proportionate collection and privacy-by-design, strengthen insider-risk governance and vetting, and build resilience against politicisation in crises and in critical infrastructure, from supply chains to space and PNT integrity. Finally, we will set the cultural scaffolds of information hygiene, dual-use judgement, accountability, and analyst wellness so truth-seeking endures pressure.
In the articles ahead, we will turn each behaviour into a small, repeatable routine. Try one at a time, measure what shifts, and share the lesson. Then add the next routine and build momentum. The aim is simple: build ethical intelligence through practice, one disciplined habit at a time.