00:00In the recruitment video, it says for over 100 years, the bedrock of MI6 has been face to face.
00:07How safe is it going to be digitally, especially when it now comes to the sophistication of hackers,
00:15even when it comes to the dark web and encrypted websites?
00:19Yes, there's an inherent problem with running people as sources remotely, indirectly and so on.
00:27And as I said, the bedrock of intelligence relationships is trust based on personal contact and personal history, if you like.
00:37But the fact is that in this situation we're in with particularly countries like Russia,
00:41it's extremely difficult for people to travel and so on outside of the country.
00:47We have to try and use whatever means we've got for obtaining information.
00:51The issue will be, of course, that there is a greater risk, I believe, of disinformation and of fake information and actually of being set up by the other side.
01:02So we'll need to be very careful in triangulating, corroborating information that we get from new sources and to test them out.
01:10And I suspect that this will not be a sole means of running new sources.
01:14It may be a sort of routine method and that will be supplemented by face-to-face meetings where those become possible.
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