> [journalist Mehdi] Hasan asked how people could be sure that Ahmed had not accepted any offers to work for the security services, to which the actor joked that it would make a “sick biopic if I was actually a fed”.
- There is no way to be sure that anyone isn't secretly working for a security service. Or more than one.
- There are extremely few scenarios where a security service* would want an agent to publicly mock their attempts to recruit him.
*Yes, this logic fails if they're incompetent. And the UK's security services have a rather mixed track record there. OTOH, the big-picture danger of incompetent security services isn't "who are their agents?" - it's that they're creepy bunglers with way too many powers. Who are busy making the world worse. At their "own" country's fiscal, legal, reputational, and moral expense.
> [journalist Mehdi] Hasan asked how people could be sure that Ahmed had not accepted any offers to work for the security services, to which the actor joked that it would make a “sick biopic if I was actually a fed”.
- There is no way to be sure that anyone isn't secretly working for a security service. Or more than one.
- There are extremely few scenarios where a security service* would want an agent to publicly mock their attempts to recruit him.
*Yes, this logic fails if they're incompetent. And the UK's security services have a rather mixed track record there. OTOH, the big-picture danger of incompetent security services isn't "who are their agents?" - it's that they're creepy bunglers with way too many powers. Who are busy making the world worse. At their "own" country's fiscal, legal, reputational, and moral expense.