Dr. Dan Lomas

The people you're trying to collect intelligence on are still relatively smart, so they might adopt anti-tech

ways of communication.

So use notes or voices.

And in that case, it requires you to use human agents.

So to use traditional spies and the, I guess with the rise of AI, yes, you are seeing the tech environment changing.

But humans are just as gullible as we were, you know, two, 3000 years ago.

So the same techniques of kind of money, ideology, recruitment, ego,

still work today.

So I think, you know, recruiting a tech expert who's involved in the AI industry would again be a really good kind of source of information and give you a new element of insight.

Again, we know from leaks in the US and reporting, for example, that Western intelligence before the invasion of Ukraine had a good understanding of what the Russians were doing, in part because they had human reporting in and around Moscow.

We know these days that both the CIA and MI6 are using online systems to encourage intelligence

spies in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere to provide information to us.

So there's a value there.

And if you look at what's happening in the Middle East, you have Israel's intelligence security community services, Mossad, are able to recruit significant numbers of Iranians to pass on information that can then be used for targeting purposes.

So you are still seeing that

quiet flow of information from individuals, but we can't necessarily see it.

We might see the tip of the iceberg as a story comes into the open, but we don't really see the day-to-day nitty-gritty work of the intelligence and security community.

But the examples you cite from history are really illustrative of the types of activities that happen now, but nowadays you're

You know, you've got a source in Dublin Castle, but then you're also adding a smartphone into the equation that feeds up information flows.

So the techniques are exactly the same.