Psychological Characteristics of Rising Generations and the Relationship between HUMINT

Today’s security challenges have intensified the need for reliable and verifiable information, which the national security services along with police organisations traditionally satisfy from human sources. This brought with it the so-called renaissance of HUMINT. At the same time, however, the psychological characteristics of the younger generations, as well as the developing trends of mobile telecommunications and social media, have also generated challenges and brought new contradictions to the surface. This paper presents some of these – of course the most obvious ones, such as time management, sharing location and images, re-evaluating personal meetings – and formulates some suggestions for dealing with the challenges (e.g. avoiding generational gaps among sources and handling personnel) also emphasising the importance of the training of human sources.