No Time to Die – Spy Fiction and the End of the Law

Abstract

Goal – the obligation to ensure internal security, constitutional order, and external security is a necessary condition for the development of any country. It is a condition that is not influenced by the state system. Only the mechanisms leading to the achievement of a given objective may be different. The vast majority of modern states in the international arena establish and maintain units called special services in order to protect their existence. The work of a given type of agency essentially involves activities aimed at guaranteeing the protection of the state. Therefore, it is necessary to compare the operations of current secret services and their officers against the backdrop of the history of the most popular secret service officer in the world. This work will answer the question of how far special services can go to ensure the protection of the state, and whether their actions break the law. Research methodology – many research methods were used to fully exhaust the topic of this dissertation. The analytical method enabled an accurate and multifaceted picture of certain phenomena found in the activities of the secret services, but most importantly, it made it possible to show extreme manifestations of law violations done by secret services officers that will never be met with negative consequences of the law. The main goal of any given method is to obtain certain empirical conclusions. The intuitive and critical methods were then applied. The former had the task of allowing the consideration of personal conjectures, concepts, and acquired knowledge while obtaining information necessary to write a given work. The latter was the perfect complement to the first one. The critical method had the task of logically justifying the hypotheses by constructive criticism and analysis of the literature on a given topic. Score/results – the fundamental aim of this article is to prove that the solutions of legal regulations concerning special services are extremely different from the actual practice of officers at given institutions. The above will help solve the main problem of this work, which is to present the opportunism of people who are supposed to protect and serve the people of their country. Special services, which are subject to public authority and controlled by supervisory bodies, should uphold the rule of law. Ultimately, the officers of these services are the lawbreakers. In light of the issues raised in the paper, this article is a good tool to use for lawyers that specialize in national security, as well as for officers at the institutions in question. Originality/value – the starting point of this work is to determine the essence of special service operations. Both intelligence and counter-intelligence services deal with secret tasks in different forms. The core function of the secret service is to protect the interests of the state, which is an important value for state security. The task of the secret service is to protect the legal order of the state in which they serve, but also to act within the limits of the law for the sake of international peace. Intelligence and counter-intelligence work usually assumes the form of classified and special operations. They are aimed at influencing, either directly or indirectly, a dangerous entity, thus causing a decrease in its political, economic, military, and moral capabilities. Special services are different from other organizations that have the task of protecting national interests. An important catalogue of rights and obligations for special services states that they are an important mechanism for preventing and destroying threats of all kinds with all possible tools. These tools can often violate fundamental human rights and the democratic rule of law. By using examples from spying fiction, it is possible to analyze the activities of secret services and assess how important or unnecessary the services may be.