Abstract
Through semi-structured interviews conducted with 38 Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) employees, the present study analyses how intelligence workers navigate confidentiality keeping and the consequences of secrecy at work and beyond. Through a lens of moral harm, we identify how engaging in secrecy can be morally harmful and how these harms intertwine with psychological, social, and interpersonal harms, with lasting effects on CSIS employees and their relationships with families, friends, colleagues, and the public. We put forth considerations for CSIS in response to their employees’ work experiences, which can prompt moral frustration, distress, harm, and injury. These considerations are situated within the unique circumstances of CSIS employment and its ensuing implications, alongside suggestions for an integration of secrecy in moral injury knowledge, to shape future theorization and new empirical directions.
Introduction
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) started operations in 1984 (Weller, 1988), in response to public concern and debate regarding intelligence services in Canada, with the creation of The CSIS Act (Wark, 2010; West, 2022). CSIS officially replaced The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Security Service, and, as a new service, this came with changes in how CSIS was structured, monitored, legally restricted, and scrutinized (Weller, 1988). Central to CSIS is the mandate of confidentiality keeping or secrecy; however, the layers or depth of this secrecy or how such materializes in daily and occupational living remains unknown. For example, internally, CSIS has “silos” or self-contained and autonomous units of activity with little or no connection between each, where work between groups is isolated due to the need for secrecy (Wark, 2010). Silos ultimately increase safety, yet intelligence services nonetheless face challenges in information sharing (Security Intelligence Review Committee, 2015), public scrutiny (Security Intelligence Review Committee, 2018), and adherence to the law while performing their mandate. CSIS is to balance “civil liberties” with the protection of the public (Hoffman, 2010, p. 38), thus, within this context, unsurprisingly, little is truly known about CSIS or—important to this study—the employees of CSIS apart from official reports related to public inquiries or incidents, which often, due to confidentiality requirements, exclude many details about a workplace culture deemed toxic or underpinned by challenges (Brodeur, 2010; see also Mukbil, 2023).
The present study, the first external research study on the CSIS to our knowledge, qualitatively explores through a lens of moral harm how CSIS employees (n = 38) engage in confidentiality keeping (i.e., secrecy) as part of their work responsibilities and the implications of confidentiality keeping or secrecy on themselves, those around them, and the public. We focus on identifying how various and discursive types of confidentiality-keeping, as required by CSIS employees, can be morally harmful, including in ways that intertwine with psychological, social, and interpersonal harms. We ask: (1) What are the consequences for staff who work for a service that is responsible for national security yet few know much about, let alone that it even exists? and (2) What are the implications of nondisclosure on those employed in this unique public safety service legitimately veiled in secrecy (see Government of Canada, 2025)?
Secrecy
Since Simmel (1906), criminological and sociological inquiry has shown some interest in understanding the relational dynamics of secrecy and deception in government organizations (Luscombe, 2018), such as intelligence services. This tempered and modest interest could be in part simply because of the difficulty of studying what is not to be known—the very practice and concept of a service where efforts strive to keep it invisible. Within scholarly research processes across disciplines, inquiry itself may require nonmandated professional confidentiality keeping for data collection purposes, which always raises largely new ethical questions and dilemmas (Pachirat, 2011). For example, ethical approvals expect any deception or covertness to be exceptionally temporary and ready to become known to restore or reinstate balance and trust (see Kluczewska & Philipp, 2023). However, the parameters for studying a covert service are ethically unclear, leaving much to be learned about the dimensions and implications of secrecy.
When secrecy, or “deception work,” is organizationally mandated for authorized agents, there are no opportunities for revelations or clarification. Instead, there is adherence to what may be conceptualized broadly as an institution's power and right to “withhold information, deny observation and dictate terms of knowledge” (Abrams, 1988, p. 62). At times, these practices have been taken up critically in select literatures for their role in reifying idealized representations of the state (Hay, 2014) or shielding “publics from learning the true nature of their plans, intentions and activities” (Luscombe, 2018, p. 402). However, secrecy is more than a mechanism for organizational and social control. Secrecy, as we conceive of the concept, is broader, describing “a social relation that divides those who know it from those who do not, and as characteristic of a certain kind of social movement” (emphasis added, Jenkins, 2013, p. 59). Here, Jenkins (2013) emphasized how secrecy is about more than the content (i.e., the secret itself); instead, secrecy includes the social dynamics and processes created by who knows versus who does not know the content, which then separates the “insiders” from the “outsiders.” Secrecy them is also about those who accept or reject the secret as truth or are privileged (i.e., a positive and negative position always) to know.
Tension can arise in who conforms to the rules and norms around confidentiality-keeping, who makes these rules, and who problematizes them (i.e., whistleblowers). Further, once started, there can be no end to secrecy as there “is always deeper knowledge to be grasped, further matters to be gone into, so that the truth is always being deferred, and the dynamic of participation is a movement towards something imperceptible” (Jenkins, 2013, pp. 60–61). Essentially, as a secret becomes more distant or grows in complexity, unique organizational social processes unfold to maintain the secret. Some scholars have argued that governmental organizations conceal some practices because these practices, if disclosed publicly, could trigger scandal, criminal proceedings, loss of legitimacy, public protest, or organizational reforms (Lowry, 1972; Luscombe, 2018; Vaughan, 1985). Lowry (1972) sharply criticized systematic secrecy in governmental organizations and institutions, beyond holding the very seed of their undoing, for how: secrecy systems take on latent functions leading to the protection of relatively useless and unreliable knowledge. The producers of such knowledge thereby maintain job security, and security systems become increasingly involved in matters of sensitivity … Serious question, therefore, must be raised about the maintenance of secrecy systems in any form, and where they are necessary for obvious security purposes, about their modification and control. (p. 437)
Given the context of CSIS, we argue that critical conceptions of secrecy and the practices and legislation enforcing secrecy for government organizations seldom appreciate the microeffects and implications of these operations, particularly how intelligence workers become concretely and discursively affected by secrecy as a mandated byproduct of their service. To elaborate, in Canada, the Foreign Interference and Security of Information Act [2024] “permanently bounds secrecy” to intelligence workers to safeguard, prohibit, and control access to sensitive government information that may relate to national security and public safety interests; failure to do so may result in criminal prosecution and severe penalties, including imprisonment (Government of Canada, 2025). CSIS, as an employer, is tasked to ensure staff compliance and adherence through polygraph testing and bank account checking periodically over the course of their occupational tenure. Therefore, the onus and legislated mandate of secrecy places extreme pressure with surveillance and responsibility on all within the service that continues beyond one's employment duration.
Further, although findings maintain that many people lack knowledge and awareness of CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service, 2018), CSIS employees do face public scrutiny and criticism, sometimes even from other professionals in public safety. Perhaps this is unsurprising because the secrecy of their work means employees often receive no credit or recognition for the work they perform, with other public safety services even being credited for their efforts. Nevertheless, many public safety professionals may not clearly know what exactly CSIS does, how, or employees’ occupational responsibilities or roles, another likely consequence of the mandatory confidentiality requirements of the work. Thus, what many citizens believe about CSIS is quite likely based on their imaginations or partial knowledge, as informed by their interpretations of intelligence (i.e., being a spy, etc.).
We put forth the impacts of secrecy, including when compounded by invisibility created by a lack of awareness of the organization's existence, may have moral implications that intertwine with psychological, social, and interpersonal consequences for CSIS employees. Moral injury, the most harmful and severe of moral violations, has been acknowledged in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual V (DSM-V) (APA, 2022; see also VanderWeele et al., 2025), thus further evidencing the connection between moral harms and mental health.
Moral Frustration, Distress, and Injury in Public Safety
Moral and ethical challenges arise in everyday life (Jameton, 1984); central to the present study, in public safety and other work sectors, moral harms may be triggered by organizational stresses where people feel morally and ethically conflicted performing their occupational responsibilities, demands, and duties (Brend et al., 2025; Ricciardelli et al., 2024, 2025). People experience moral and ethical challenges on a continuum that may or may not affect day-to-day functioning but nonetheless produce conditions in which physical, mental, and social health may become compromised (Litz & Kerig, 2019). People are morally frustrated when they experience annoyance or a sense of contempt without drastically affecting their well-being; moral distress occurs when people experience a serious form of psychological distress due to situations where they believe they cannot act on what they know to be right (Jameton, 1984). Moral distress can lead to moral injury, which refers to situations where people do or do not engage in actions that, consequently, violate their morals (i.e., moral ethics) or personal values (Williamson et al., 2021). Moral frustration, distress, and injury, we argue, are all forms or variants of moral harms because experiencing any may result in deep feelings of betrayal and questioning over what is/should have been the “right” course of action, including those taken by people in positions of authority (Williamson et al., 2021).
In the public safety sector, experiences with moral harms have been explored alongside their potential deleterious mental health and organizational implications (Roth et al., 2023). Recognizing that each public safety sector (e.g., police, communications, correctional, firefighting, paramedic, etc.) is distinct operationally and organizationally, we borrow from their literatures, given the lack of scholarship to date on moral harms among intelligence service employees. Among public safety professionals, for instance, D’Alessandro-Lowe et al. (2025) surveyed 181 individuals across fire, correctional service, paramedic, and policing sectors between June 2022 and June 2023. One reported finding was that moral injury was negatively associated with perceived organizational support, spiritual well-being, and self-compassion. In response, they concluded that although public safety professionals and related groups may continue to experience moral injury because of job-related duties, there is an opportunity for intervention, including spiritually informed resources, self-compassion training, and social and organizational support.
In correctional services more specifically, Ricciardelli et al. (2024) found moral harms may arise from correctional staff experiencing tension between the stated mandates and policies of the organization and actual implementation of these objectives, management practices (i.e., inaccessibility and disconnect understanding frontline roles), challenges with retaining staff (i.e., leading to potentially dangerous understaffing), training needs, lack of mental health support and resources (see also Ricciardelli et al., 2025). Researchers have also found a misalignment between policy aspirations to support incarcerated people's families and practices that, paradoxically, harm them (Wolkind, 2026; see also Aliverti, 2020; Aliverti et al., 2025).
Moral harms have been found to produce compromised mental health and professional judgement in select public safety workers and other professionals, including healthcare and social workers (Austin et al., 2017; Palma Contreras & Pardo Adriasola, 2024; Smith et al., 2021). Smith et al. (2021) identified how most, if not all, correctional nurses will experience some form of moral distress in their careers, often resulting in burnout, blurred professional boundaries, and impaired ethical reasoning. To respond to these findings, in their recent study of Canadian correctional agents (n = 77), Brend et al. (2025) found that correctional organizations perceived by staff to be more trauma-informed and responsive were associated with lower levels of moral distress, suggesting “workers who see evidence that their organization is working to care for them, do in turn feel better” (p. 8). There is more research needed to understand pathways to moral harm in public safety organizations, like CSIS, as well as considerations for preventative and responsive strategies to reduce and/or support the implications of moral harms.
Current Study
The current project is underpinned by two research objectives: (i) to understand how secrecy or confidentiality keeping, as mandated by CSIS, can morally harm an employee, and the psychological, social, and intrapersonal implications of such moral harms, and (ii) to help CSIS identify plausible proactive and reactive responses to moral harms reflective of how such harms manifest. In response, we qualitatively explored, pragmatically and theoretically, the experience of maintaining secrecy as a CSIS employee, the obstacles and considerations for achieving this preservation of confidentiality, and consequential moral frustration, distress, and/or injury. We approached the study using an “appreciative” approach to inquiry (Liebling et al., 1999) couched in a realist epistemological orientation (Bonino et al., 2014), meaning we interpreted data as constituting, in part, a reality and truth whereby the phenomenon under study can be made known and rendered intelligible through words, stories, and narratives and strove to understand the reasons and justifications that determine how CSIS operates. Thus, we always appreciate the context(s) in which decisions and practices materialize and are legitimized at CSIS when interpreting data. One context being how the seemingly isolating nature of CSIS as an organization compromises the services’ opportunities to learn from other organizations’ growing pains or acquire advice from external sources. Thus, we aim to analyze the underpinning motivations and efforts within diverse contexts that inform actions and choices, acknowledging the implications of explicit and implicit outcomes in relation to moral harms experienced by CSIS employees and their manifest and latent health consequences.
Methodology
Study Design and Recruitment
Data were produced through 38 in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted by two members of the research team with CSIS employees in 2024. CSIS collaborated with the Principal Investigator to develop and implement recruitment procedures by advertising the study internally through their listserv (which we could not access) and through verbal dissemination (i.e., after select participants told others about the study who they felt should participate). Recruitment processes clearly explained that CSIS would never have access to raw data nor be in a position to inform data analyses, and no interested CSIS employee was excluded from participation. Participants, after learning about the study, emailed the Principal Investigator to schedule an interview. To further protect identities and enhance confidentiality, interviews were only conducted by phone without the provision of phone numbers (i.e., participants called the interviewer through a masked number), rather than through virtual mediums, which adhered to organizational policies and procedures.
Participants only provided verbal consent, which interviewers audio-recorded, and caution was taken never to record any personal identifiers (i.e., name) prior to commencing the phone interview. Before conducting any interview, we reminded participants of the measures we took and continue to take to protect their identities. Our positions are academic in nature, as no member of the research team is a current or former employee of CSIS. In recognizing that all qualitative research is shaped by paradigmatic influences (Guba & Lincoln, 2005), we strove to discuss and resolve any differences in analysis or interpretation through regular meetings and ongoing communication.
To guide our interviews, we used a semi-structured approach to prioritize following the conversational pathways of participants whose work culture, mental health concerns, and organizational praxis remain largely unknown to the scientific community. The interview guide ensured interviewers asked about all five key constructs (i.e., Positioning; Occupational Factors; Work Impacts on Components of Life; Available Support and Resources; and Barriers to Health) pertinent to the locus of the study—which in this article is participants’ experiences with moral harms because of or at work.
Procedures
The study was confidential, voluntary, and anonymous, with the exception of potential recognition of voices, which were recorded, transcribed using non-cloud-based software, and then the audio files were immediately deleted. Before the interview and audio recording commenced, the interviewer explained the project's purpose, scope, and details to participants, who could ask the interviewer questions or express concerns about the study. Following each interview, participants were immediately assigned a new classified participant number, which, as such, was removed for the present article. This ensures no participant quoted can be identified (correctly or not) because their words cannot be connected across any publications (i.e., reports, articles, and news media), despite software if attempted. Further, we can never confirm who participated in the study, nor have a way to connect any participant with their interview transcript, which was listened to and edited for accuracy. Field notes were taken to assist the interviewer with probes when necessary without impairing the flow of conversation during the interview.
When reporting results, to compensate for the inability to identify unique participants, we very rarely quote a participant more than once, meaning each quote is usually from a unique participant. We do not report the individual demographics of each participant per quote because this is an exploratory (and preliminary) qualitative study centered around understanding how security intelligence employees experience unique forms of moral harm in relation to their occupational mandate of secrecy; since participants did not report explicitly how these demographics were at play in shaping their work experiences, imposing our interpretations of such throughout the analysis could be misleading or even harmful. We reminded participants that we would be writing a report and possibly journal articles based on these interview data, and they would have access to the final report through CSIS. Participants were interviewed based only on their interest in the study and availability. Although no participant did, all were reminded they could skip questions, take a break, or refrain from commenting. Interviews typically lasted between 45 and 120 min. This project was approved by Memorial University of Newfoundland's Interdisciplinary Committee on Ethics in Human Research (ICEHR) prior to data collection (File No. 20240344-MI).
Data Analysis
The analytic process followed these measures: first, we created a codebook by having three members of the research team each read five different transcripts and document primary, secondary, and tertiary codes (i.e., emergent themes and subthemes). Then another research team member amalgamated the codebooks into one document and coded five more transcripts, creating additional codes, collapsing duplicate codes, and shaping the nuances of other codes. Our process of utilizing multiple members of the research team to develop the codebook helped to ensure interrater reliability. After the codebook was fully constructed, we coded all the transcripts according to empirical themes inductively produced from these data (but not new theory or concepts) using QSR NVivo 14 software for data organization and management. We conducted axial coding and then applied focused coding (see Charmaz, 2014; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Our focus was always on what tied different experiences together and to explain seeming contradictions and nuances across participants speaking of the same phenomenon. Quotes presented have been slightly edited, when appropriate, for readability, grammar, and punctuation, without affecting vernacular, meaning, or altering participants’ words. All data presented were made unclassified by CSIS.
Results: The Challenges of Secrecy
Through a lens of moral harms, we present findings, first in relation to the operationalization of confidentiality keeping at CSIS as expressed by our participants. Then we present the empirical challenges of secrecy in relation to moral harms as intertwined with employee health with the realms of self (i.e., changes in personality: isolation, becoming jaded, and increasingly introverted), work (i.e., with colleagues), family (i.e., relations outside work), friends, and broader society (i.e., public perception).
Confidentiality Keeping at CSIS
CSIS employees felt their occupational inability to name or discuss their employer, their job, and their work realities created relationship challenges: “Absolutely, it is [a complicated space]. And being in national security obviously is a bit more because, of course, we just can’t talk about what we do.” Another participant echoed, “maybe a handful of people know where I work.” The consequences on participants’ lives were tangible; for example, one participant had challenges with “banking” because qualifying for loans, credit, and so forth requires disclosing “what you do and it's hard because I can’t really disclose where I work or what I do.” Thus, acquiring a mortgage and/or loan could be laced with barriers, resulting in concerns around financial security and growth. Likewise, participants struggled with not having access to their phone during the workday, which has resulted in canceled or missed appointments. Despite explaining to people, “nine to five, Monday to Friday, this is how you have to reach me. There's no understanding of the fact that we don’t have use of our cell phones. Like nobody [can] even conceive of it.” This included being inaccessible to their loved ones and dependents during the workday, which could intensify worry or create isolation. Thus, not being able to disclose their employer or anything related to their intelligence work, including accomplishments and merits earned through tenures of service, had implications for CSIS employees, including on their relationships and thus interactions with family members, friends, and broader society, a reality reciprocally carrying potentially devastating implications for their perceptions of self and how they operate socially. Again, in this way, working for CSIS could be experienced as isolating both when and when not working.
Implications for the Self
Social Isolation
Participants’ inability to talk about work left many of them socially isolated, feeling their ability to form meaningful social relationships had diminished, and, in consequence, alone with their thoughts. Participants admitted “I don’t relate to people because of my work,” which was experienced as ensuring “you keep to yourself” or: … hard because I’ll come home and I’m exhausted and I don’t wanna do anything and I’m kind of lost in my head, but I can’t verbalize it and I can’t explain why. So, it creates a bit of a distance with you and other people [emphasis added].
The isolation was a consequence of the different, uniquely performative (i.e., selectively ambiguous) ways participants related to and interacted with people outside of work. They, participants described, maintained a “cover” which included “always” having a “very general and boring” story to share about where they work (e.g., “public safety and I work as an admin”). Another participant described their “cover” as “you’ve always got your legend, your story of what you do, where you work, and to just keep that on as well.” This participant's words, “to just keep that on as well,” referring to their cover or “story,” suggest the practice has weight, thus adding stress. The stress included, for some participants, “always [being] so worried of oversharing. I don’t wanna break rules.”
Essentially, in many ways, isolation was presented as a protective measure, despite if the isolation resulted from a preference or desire to be alone versus a decision made from fear, concern, or avoidance. Confidentiality keeping requires isolating where they work, and a large portion of their work skills and experiences in almost all of their relationships, and what is shared must fall within the boundaries of what is organizationally and legally permitted to be shared. For some participants, efforts to protect the confidentiality of their work and employer felt deceptive because such behavior is how they “maintain the illusion” of their “cover,” which is “just awkward” when trying to be truthful. A participant, echoing others, described the paradoxical dichotomy as “you have to be able to live those two lives,” and another described how “the version of who you are to your kids and the version of who you are to your [work] friends is a different person.” The dual identity emerging from the need for participants to compartmentalize work when not working, including at home, could be compromising and requires employees to remain diligent. Forced deception when wanting to engage meaningfully with people outside of work was morally frustrating for those conflicted about lying or omitting truth: People talk a lot about what they do and things that they go through at work, and I can’t provide any details and sometimes it feels, even like, deceptive … just kind of isolating, it makes you almost feel like a bad person at times even … Because you have to keep lying. I think it goes against my natural instinct as a person, which can be stressful. Just kind of departs from how I view myself as a person [emphases added].
A temporal factor also emerged where the secrecy for some participants became less tolerable and thus tenable with time. Participants with longer occupational tenure found that not being able to talk about work changed over their decades of employment at CSIS. At first, these participants found the secretiveness “cool” and “fun,” but at the time of interview, they described “silence” and “unfortunate, sometimes awkward when you are meeting new people and you can’t obviously talk about your work and they’re asking you questions and people are curious, having to lie about my job and what I do.” Thus, something once mysterious or “cool” with occupational tenure became rather burdensome, even requiring strategies to support maintaining secrecy, such as: “try[ing] to avoid talking about my work after 20 years, it is stressful and it's not nice and it's not fun and cool anymore.” The phenomenon of maintaining secrecy, while initially framed as a welcoming and exciting aspect of a unique form of public safety work, eventually became a source of moral frustration (i.e., having to abstain/restrain oneself constantly from disclosure versus desires for recognition and relatability) that may build, accumulate, and worsen over time. One participant explicitly stated that not being able to talk about their work was “a moral injury in some ways [emphasis added].” They believe the CSIS environment is “definitely, so much moral injury [emphasis added]. Having to do the work that I did, experience what I experienced, and not being able to tell anyone about it. Total secrecy, threats of the Official Secrets Act.” Thus, they explained the isolation and fear of (legislated) consequences resulting from not speaking of their work experiences, included moral harm to self. The alternative to secrecy being punishment and consequence for any confidentiality breach, as well as a compromise to the security of Canada.
Becoming Jaded
Participants in describing changes to their personality over the course of their occupation tenure spoke of developing a more “jaded” or “cynical” outlook, particularly regarding citizens. A participant, for example, described how learning and seeing how little people were attentively and thus heard responses, when asking questions about their work, said: “everybody always says, what do you do for a living? But nobody's really listening.” Another participant shared how, when they report being employed by the ministry, people “make assumptions and you don’t correct them.” Thus, to manage the public, a participant: … just naturally drifts all time because they [people] can’t not bug me about what I do for a living and keep their mouth shut. It kind of also fosters a bit of a morbid sense of humorat times because you gotta have fun with it somehow.
Introverted
Some interviewees felt working for CSIS has led them to become more “introverted.” A participant who described themselves as always a “quiet” person felt they became increasingly introverted because of their work, such that if “I go on a trip, and someone starts being too chatty with me. I’m very wary. They create here an aura around you personally where you have to be extremely mindful.” Essentially, the participant, like another, said they became more “veiled because we are trained to not say much.” A participant referred to this situation as horrific at times. And what was worse was the one thing that can help you avoid PTSD is the ability to talk to others about it. And the fact that we can’t talk about it. You, even inside the organization, are compartmentalized.
The outcome affects participants’ sense and expressions of self, as for some participants, introversion was thought easier than causing unintentional harms (i.e., “not insult[ing] people”) or navigating the many nuances of nondisclosure. This decision is framed by our participants as creating inevitable dilemmas where participants felt their options were largely limited to retreating or silence. In this way, a participant noted they “can’t really go home and debrief…” yet they did bring home hypervigilance because of the work. This hypervigilance was omnipresent, for instance, in “checking out the gym to make sure there was like no white supremacists working there [ensuring there was no ideologically motivated violence (IMV)]” or keeping a “very low profile online … you have to be hyper-aware of everything you’re doing.” Thus, participants cannot speak to what they know and struggle to process yet the effects of such knowledge, includes less trust in society and more caution in how one lives and vigilance toward the safe-keeping of their colleagues, loved ones, and selves. A select few participants, however, described appreciating how not being able to talk about work allowed them to not “bring it home with me”; these few participants often could “leave it [work] behind.” Although one participant admitted “that takes a long time to sort of get used to. Because it's the norm for us, but it's not the norm for other people.”
Implications for Colleagues
Their relationships with colleagues, participants reported, were embedded in a complex dichotomy at work, where on one side, colleagues felt connected within their teams in the service: It's very easy for us to talk inside the building about what's going on. And this is why a lot of people marry within the service. Because even when you’re at home, you can talk with someone who's also authorized to discuss those things.
Participants advised caution in speaking with colleagues and did not frame sharing with colleagues as a way out, so to speak, of the collateral consequence associated with secrecy, the moral violations. However, they spoke of working on a “cohesive” and “team oriented” unit, noting, “we had a lot of friendships with people we worked with more, I did more so with people I worked with than, than the people that were outside of work.” However, as much as work could “bring us more together,” there were also challenges with being so insular “like group think.” To elaborate, because the participants can speak directly with “coworkers about what we do … it makes me feel almost closer to the people that I work with than the people who are my friends and outside of work.” At work, a participant described having “a very small group of people that you actually can discuss things with. Probably, two or three people. You’re all in the same boat, but you keep it within the unit or the desk.” The participant, in turn, described themselves as not a big person for building relationships with other people at work at this point in my life. It's mostly my team that I work with … so I’ve got a person that I can talk to and go through things with, which is really great.
Participants also described some of the limitations of these work relationships, where they have “maybe two people that I can speak in a way, but not completely. And we are restrained here … Everything related to operation. We are not allowed to [talk about it].” These challenges even extend to “the rest of government … there's this very awkward thing where even if we’re talking to other federal government employees, we’re supposed to be hidden.” A participant echoed this reality, explaining the implications: “it's tricky because it cuts you off from such an important strategy for emotion processing.” A participant spoke of how “you might be going through absolute bullshit and your friend [at work], you can’t talk to ‘em about it’ cause you’re in this compartmentalized thing.” Given this individual reality, participants were aware that people around them may also be in pain, but “you don’t realize they’re going through pain and so you can’t help them.” They presented a sort of existential crisis for participants who wanted to help colleagues around them but cannot, as they cannot even speak about the dilemma meaningfully to most people in their lives, which can feel morally violating.
Specifically, when wanting to talk to people, one participant realized “I need somebody with [top] secret clearance.” They explained how “I have friends working in separate units that I’m working in right now, that I can’t talk to them about my job, nor can they talk to me about their job. And we all have top secret clearance.” Another participant felt isolated from these extra layers of confidentiality protection, being “surrounded by people, they’re not doing the same job as I am. I can’t have work conversations.” A different participant also explained that their unit at CSIS “has always been isolated,” which occurred because CSIS employees in different units do not necessarily know each other and some units were “never, never allowed to mingle with the others, really,” thus perpetuating social exclusion and insular thought. Overall, communication amongst colleagues can become increasingly complex and trivial because people are uninformed or not fully informed about the work others are doing; as such, employees could find a “fight” arises when trying to explain, without explaining, why different units require different needs and resources. A participant summed up this ordeal around resources: “that is always a fight. Always a fight.” The moral challenges here are multifold, either in close relationships with colleagues, participants could not necessarily disclose or find support for the consequences of their work on self, nor could they in the greater organizations where they were siloed into their team and truly did not know others outside those they “needed to know.” Thus, the moral violation remained that in doing their work, in serving Canada, they remained unrecognized even within their own Service as well as the federal government.
Implications for Family
Mitigating and preventing the risks and consequences inherent to breaking silence and secrecy about work do not simply rest on the individual alone: There is always that thing in the back of your mind of [how] you can’t openly talk about your job and the people who do know you just have to trust that they’re not talking about your job openly either because I can put somebody at risk.
Unsurprisingly, participants’ familial relationships were affected (i.e., loss of intimacy and fears for safety) by how “we feel like we cannot say the real things. Even my wife … I never talked to my wife about what's going on in my day.” Without sharing what is on one's mind and daily happenings, relationships can start to deteriorate, losing closeness and becoming less emotively supportive. A participant remembered how: when I was first going through, we were told like not to share anything with anybody. So not being able to even confide in my [spouse] the kind of things that … [were] really difficult. Now they’re a bright, smart, intelligent [person], it was very easy for [them] to figure out why I was getting called into the office on a Saturday morning. ‘cause [they] could just flip on the news and get a good idea.
Some participants described strained relationships resulting from their employment: “in the last 10 years, all the real, real, real, real, real fights I got with my [spouse] are related to my work. A hundred percent of the time.” A participant believed their spouse: gets frustrated because I’ll be kind of sharing something that's sort of human resources related where I’m frustrated with something going on and [my partner] doesn’t really have a grasp of what that means and the scope.
Nevertheless, the “right thing to do is not to talk about work. I wouldn’t even talk about it with my spouse [on] good days, bad days.” Yet, working for CSIS was hard, but not just on established “romantic relationships,” where some can be “understanding and accept” or hurt and angry that they cannot talk about their work. Working for CSIS was also straining when dating, trying to start relationships. Simply trying to explain they are not reachable during the day to a new love interest was complex enough, let alone the processes involved once the relationship becomes more serious, and the knowledge of where one works is to be shared requires a security assessment. Not surprisingly, leaning on family for support could be difficult, if even possible, as is being there and reachable for family when needed too.
Here, not having access to their phone during the workday was hard because people “can’t reach me and they don’t have my work number because they can’t have it.” Another described being unreachable even in emergency situations, thus “when you have kids … it's been a lot more difficult. Can’t access my emails during the work hours. I don’t have access to my phone. I’m basically very difficult to reach during that time.” This was particularly concerning when children were in daycare; thus, most CSIS employees used the same daycare, where there is an understanding about the parent not being reachable during the day: all of the children who go there, their parents work either here or [redacted]. So that's like helpful as well because if I’m generally unreachable, which I am, at least they understand, and I don’t have to explain anything. We’re not like weird in anyway.
Implications for Friendships
In social interactions with friends, secrecy “… makes you less capable in a social setting, participating in conversations, because work is such an important part of people's lives. If you can’t talk about it, you’re really shutting off a lot of conversation.” The mandated silence “creates distance”: If you’re trying to make friends, it makes it hard because most people will talk about their work and identify what they do because it's part of your identity. But I don’t talk about my work, so it makes it hard to make friends.
Participants took additional necessary precautions, as “you cannot get drunk, wasted like everyone else because if it happens and you talk” there are consequences. Thus, as a participant noted, “there's little restrictions on your life and people that even after you leave the organization, if you ever leave or retire, you have to live and keep all these secrets. There's lasting [life changing] effects.” These lasting implications of CSIS work can be morally harmful, creating tension, challenges, even barriers, for friendships by imposing necessary distance and secrecy. Participants felt unable to be their true self within friendships and instead required strategies for deception, weakening bonds, or impeding their formation. When a moral dilemma arose, the glass remained half empty as the potential consequences for inaccurately placed trust always loomed, creating moral tensions. Overall, the problem is the effect of knowing reliable relationships feel nearly impossible to create and maintain without experiencing some form of (sometimes and everyday) frustration.
Implications for Public Interactions
When interacting with the public, many instances left participants experiencing hardship because their confidentiality-keeping makes them unable to correct stories about their employer, colleagues, and work content: It's hard sometimes when you hear people, [when using] transit and you hear people on transit talking about, “oh, a news article that came out about this, or a news article that came out about that.” And the fact that I’m in the back minding my own business, and I know that what they’re talking about, it's pretty much nonsense. I’m watching this soccer game and this parent is standing beside me and the parent is talking about something that's happened, I think it was in Iraq at the time, and they were talking about car bombs over there and stuff … And, and they’re like, “oh my God, did you see the news?” And I’m like, “what news?” … “oh, there was this car bomb and near the Canadian embassy in Iraq, and oh my God, I’m so glad that doesn’t happen here. That could never happen here.” They said, “everybody loves Canada.” And I'm like, “oh yeah, I agree.” … I had literally just stopped a terrorist attack that day. I’m standing there looking at him thinking, “you’re an idiot.”
Participants found “misinformation” among the public frustrating, including morally frustrating, particularly because they were not “able to share” or provide clarification, particularly if the misinformation is fueling stereotypes and stigmatizing discourses about the Service and its employees. A participant lamented, feeling at a loss over the lack of public recognition they receive for their service: We’re doing some really cool stuff, where stuff will be in the media, and we’ve had a hand in it, or we’ve worked on it … but we can’t talk about it, or our name's not associated to it because we’re under the radar. It's too bad.
Discussion
In the present study, we sought to understand how the confidentiality keeping (i.e., secrecy) required for CSIS employment could create moral harms with social, psychological, and interpersonal implications. The moral harms, if frustration, distress, or injury, crossed all domains that were relational or interactive: self, colleagues, family and friends, and with the public. Simply said, this is because CSIS employees are unable to disclose their employer or duties, and for those who are aware of where they work, such as a spouse or intimate partner, they too are submitted to scrutiny and suspicion. Even tangible and more easily explainable outcomes of their work experience could leave participants distressed, explaining why or where they worked. For instance, due to non-disclosure of their employer, some employees could not qualify for a mortgage and found insurance challenging to acquire or at a higher premium. Further, logistical and emergency issues due to not being able to have their phone on their person during the day (i.e., missed calls, including in crisis situations) were difficult for participants. Participants lamented over how being disconnected during the day can complicate their relationships and health, in consequence. In response, it may be helpful for CSIS to develop and implement blanket policies for overcoming these more tangible consequences; for instance, CSIS could work with different financial institutions and insurance providers to help qualify their employees for mortgages. Regarding being inaccessible, CSIS could create a direct unclassified line for employees to use for emergency calls with a number that can be provided externally on each floor of their buildings.
Participants who worked in team-oriented environments received some satisfaction from the tight bonds created with the people they immediately worked with; however, if such an environment was absent, genuine strains emerged (without any reprieve from such at home). Largely, most viewed their colleagues as people with whom they were closer to in comparison to others they befriend or are acquainted with in broader society. However, even close work relationships could not provide support due to internal “need-to-know” policies preventing disclosure and thus the support. Employees are still essentially restrained in silence at work (outside their team), and most did not know people beyond those with whom they worked directly. Moral harms prevailed when employees witnessed close colleagues seeming to be in undisclosed pain, leaving employees unable to help, only learning about the harm when the situation becomes an exposed crisis. Again, such experiences tended not to align with participants’ expectations, creating moral frustration and even possible distress when colleagues reach a point of crisis. Perhaps the onus is on the CSIS leadership to ensure that the onboarding of new employees provides appropriate training on how to manage the internal and external restrictions of the role when interacting with colleagues. Here, education on how to help manage the unique challenges associated with managing personal relationships, including at work.
Perhaps without surprise, our participants described experiences of isolation, particularly given that society is very much structured on small talk, particularly around where one is employed. Conversations around what they do for a living, instead of casual and easy dialogue, are always laced with occupational challenges and forced decisions that, despite being necessary, may violate their sense of self. To reduce isolation and the accompanying effects, a possibility may include improving social relationships at work by considering creating sports teams, extracurricular and recreational clubs, or other ways to engage socially like in designated spaces for fitness or collective breaks. By creating avenues for social interactions that do not require work-related disclosures among people with a shared mandate of secrecy, employees may experience reduce isolation and less awkward interactions. Further, they may acquire informal supports from peers, which could be helpful for their health. A formal peer support program is a consideration; however, peer support remains ambiguous in outcome for peer health, thus there remains many questions around formal peer support efficacy for CSIS employees (Fallon et al., 2023; Lucia & Halloran, 2020).
Given the social norms around work disclosure (i.e., to disclose), many participants reported being intentionally deceptive; either choosing to lie, refrain, or withdraw from interactions (i.e., to avoid lying). Regardless of how they lived up to demands for secrecy, deception harmed their self, violating at times, their morals because these mandated actions conflicted with their integrity and self-identification. The moral harm here is associated directly with ontological incompatibility, meaning the work realities required of them misaligned with who they want(ed) to be as an individual. The harm and frustration intensified when participants felt those with whom they could interact more meaningfully with believed they were being dishonest, breaking down trust. Social consequences, including hindered relationships, were then likely outcomes in interactions with the public, friends, and even extended family (i.e., outside those permitted to know).
Harm intensified with occupational tenure, as some reported originally finding the secrecy enticing and exciting; however, over time, the consequences of secrecy became almost toxically isolating and resulted in compromised morals. Specifically, moral frustration surfaced when participants were largely annoyed or even expressed contempt toward the need for secrecy, yet for some, the frustration became moral distress (or injury). This was evidenced by the participants who communicated personal and seemingly on-going, irresolvable, tragic violations of their preferred ways of being (Williamson et al., 2021). The consequences again being interpersonal, as well as psychological and social. In response, an avenue of support for employees, CSIS may wish to explore, is opportunities to develop and deliver training to employees with strategies for how to refrain from disclosing in ways that feel less deceptive and more normative and honest, thus causing them less harm with fewer psychological and social outcomes too.
Given the realities to which CSIS employees are exposed, many reported increasing hypervigilance and distrust outside of (or even at) work, again evidencing psychological consequences and changes to self. They were very cautious if they used any social media or online forums to ensure risk was not posed to their loved ones and self. While CSIS employees described being protective of themselves and their loved ones, not being able to disclose to a spouse still harmed relationships and impeded support-seeking capacities. The essence was the creation of a barrier between spouses as secrets, and the inability to update on daily ongoings impeded closeness, as did the inability to seek support or reach out to loved ones when counsel would be desirable and helpful. Moreover, one outcome was a growing disdain for an organization that was perceived by some employees’ partners as inherently, via their structure and policies, creating tension in intimate relationships. The moral harm, here, surfaces from communication breakdown as participants feel pulled between choosing transparency and intimacy in their spousal relationship or protecting the Service and, essentially, national security. Thus, participants were left appearing more loyal to their employer, thus Canada, than their partner, even if this was far from the truth, as they essentially were keeping their loved ones safe in doing their work—the very work they could not discuss. The tension here was that their work at times felt prioritized over family, which is counter to the intuitive essence where work is to be secondary, a method to support and strengthen family stability.
CSIS, in response, may better support their employees by creating some variant of a virtual, self-directed, family support training for the loved ones of CSIS employees. Within public safety sectors, some of these initiatives do exist and may provide a starting point for seeing what could work for CSIS. In addition, an ongoing assessment and self-directed tool that could help employees understand (a) the broader health effects of working for the service; (b) methods to navigate common challenges in familial relationships; and (c) when support or intervention may be required to support social, physical, and mental health, which may prove beneficial to staff and the Service too. Perhaps, in doing so, the feelings ranging from moral frustration to injury could be mitigated through more understanding from loved ones and less detrimental consequences on relationships when difficult choices are made in secret as mandated by Canadian law (Government of Canada, 2025).
CSIS employees described changes to self; some became jaded in their outlook, feeling people often do not listen, are insincere, and pay little attention to what details people share. The consequence is a view of individuals as inherently self-focused. They also reported challenges with knowing the capability of select people in the world given their work-related exposures, which challenged their own ability to trust others and could lead to questioning the integrity, a priori, of others who they meet. The implications include growing introversion and isolation, which were widely reported experiences by participants. Although introversion may be what led some individuals to CSIS employment, introversion could result from the occupational work (both areas requiring further study); becoming more introverted and withdrawn was viewed by some participants as the safest, least risky option, even in light of the deleterious social and health effects these imbalances or changes create. Introversion, often with isolation, was also necessary to some who felt they offended others due to their inability to disclose, specifically people who question their relationship's integrity because they feel they are being deemed untrustworthy. Thus, such moral character reflections, like the classic “looking glass self” (see Cooley, 1902), could result in personal hurt and create tension anew between who one is and who one is perceived to be in character. In consequence, many participants experienced serious limitations in many aspects of their lives that eventually create tensions, fears, limits to personal sharing, and other aspects of sociality, perhaps privileges, many of us take for granted in everyday life. Living secretly, or in part secretly, they are largely unknown insiders protecting the public (outsiders), yet knowledge of who they are and what they do is a risk to all, requiring diligent efforts to avoid.
Our participants reported moral harms due to public perceptions. Basically, the sentiment was, if and when they were successful in fulfilling their occupational responsibilities (i.e., stopping a terrorist attack), other policing/public safety services, such as the RCMP, were credited. Yet, when a threat to national security occurred within their jurisdiction (i.e., terrorism and hate crimes), they felt vilified in the media and public interpretations, which tended not to work with all the facts or information which is legally withheld and thus may succumb to flawed reasoning and conclusions (i.e., misinformation spreading), especially when analyzing partial knowledge (Luscombe, 2018). Thus, CSIS employees received no credit for work done well, because unfortunately, one cannot know what they do and can only understand and protect against what they do know. In response to a seemingly impossible situation, an avenue of communication for correcting, when appropriate, misinformation in the news, media, and public would prove helpful. However, a focused study on the effects of misinformation and its relation to moral harm is required to structure and develop such a communication strategy, given the sensitive nature of the occupational work of CSIS employees.
Conclusion
CSIS employees are an unstudied group of public safety professionals; as such, we aimed to fill this void in knowledge by analyzing how their work created moral harms with social, psychological, and interpersonal effects. Confidentiality-keeping emerged as a central challenge due to secrecy around CSIS occupational contexts and realities, which can lead to distinct and concrete experiences with moral frustration, distress, and injury, all of which appear to be shaped by incompatibilities between their personhood and occupational mandate.
Our study is limited insofar as we did not interview participants in person, which removes situational knowledge about their work environment; qualitative findings are likely not generalizable to other intelligence services; and only two authors conducted interviews. Although it is challenging for CSIS to assist with or remedy such interpretations, there is a way forward rooted in exploring the development of training modules related to relationship management for CSIS and methods of redirection for employees to use, socially. Further, given that CSIS employees are also isolated from each other at work, there may be opportunities to further evolve the social health of employees by identifying alternative methods in which employees could be assisted in forming social bonds, internally and externally, due to the imposed confines of mandatory secrecy requirements. Perhaps another possibility here is to create internal support networks for interested employees that allow for sharing and support (within the rules and regulations) or even trusted partner supports through collaboration with other public safety organizations or the military, particularly other subpopulations within these services that focus on intelligence. CSIS may also want to consider if all CSIS employees, in all areas of work, truly require such isolation from one another.
Our study is a starting point; much more work is needed to uncover the health and work realities of intelligence workers shaping their well-being and moral and ethical conflicts. These understandings, we argue, can only be realized through approaches to inquiry built foundationally on respect, appreciation, and empathy for the service public safety professionals provide, at their own peril.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We want to extend our thanks to the many unnamed people who approved and encouraged our research, as well as all those who participated. We thank you for your continuous and ongoing support and for sharing in our belief that, together, we can make positive change a reality. We hope our findings contribute to improvements in the organization and support CSIS’ vision, mission, and values. To our participants, we are grateful for your time, energy, effort, and the relationships that have resulted from this research. We thank all at CSIS for their service, for keeping our families, loved ones, and Canada safe. We hope all who participated see themselves in this study.
Ethical Considerations
This study was approved by Memorial University of Newfoundland's Interdisciplinary Committee on Ethics in Human Research (ICEHR) prior to data collection (File No. 20240344-MI).
Consent to Participate
All participants in this study provided informed verbal consent (which was audio-recorded) to participate in this study and have this work published.
Consent to Publication
All participants in this study provided informed verbal consent (which was audio-recorded) to participate in this study and have this work published.
Author Contributions
RR and SRM designed and conceptualized the study, took part in recruitment and data collection procedures, and supervised the research team assigned to this study. RR, SRM, and MSJ analyzed qualitative data and contributed to the interpretation of these data in relation to the medical literature. RR and MJ drafted the article; during subsequent drafts, SRM added material, insights, and intellectual content to the article in each section of the article. RR, MSJ, and SRM worked on subsequent drafts until each author approved the final version.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data Availability Statement
The qualitative data used in this study are not available for public distribution due to ethical considerations regarding participant confidentiality.