MI5 wants to shed its cocktail-guzzling posho image – so it's opened an Instagram account
- Reference: 1619099107
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/04/22/mi5_instagram_cocktail_quaffing_poshos/
- Source link:
News of the agency's foray into the Facebook-owned platform, which shows you heavily filtered photographs from the perspective of somebody whose world consists of estate agents' marketing photoshoots and perfume ads, came this morning as part of a recruitment drive.
[1]
MI5 chief Ken McCallum said in a statement about @mi5official: "You can insert your own joke about whether we will be following you."
The account can be viewed [2]here , though to view posts on it you'll need to be a registered user. The first post by MI5 on Instagram was a photo of the entrance to its London HQ. We are sure MI5 is happy to have [3]contributed towards Facebook's object-recognition AI project , given how the agency [4]greedily hoovers up data about Britons' online habits in the hope of finding enemy spies, terrorists, criminals, and so on.
We are told that "being more open" is the key to spy agency recruitment in the 2020s, with McCallum adding, for the [5]Daily Telegraph : "We must get past whatever martini-drinking stereotypes may be lingering by conveying a bit more of what today's MI5 is actually like, so that people don't rule themselves out based on perceived barriers such as socio-economic background, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, or which part of the country they happen to have been born in."
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Exactly how an Instagram account achieves that wasn't explained; the platform is famous for influencers grifters posing in bars, hotels, and holiday destinations while [7]imperiously demanding free stuff from any business they encounter on their travels.
Thou shalt not hack indiscriminately, High Court of England tells Britain's spy agencies [8]READ MORE
The odds of MI5 becoming an influencer are probably low, though perhaps some future incarnation of James Bond's Q [9]could become a profitable robot influencer .
Lest anyone be fooled by this twee display, the agency's previous boss used his departure speech to call for E2E encryption on messaging platforms [10]to be backdoored so his employees wouldn't have to work too hard .
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On the flip side, it does do some good in the world; earlier this week MI5's CPNI offshoot warned of hostile countries [12]targeting British public-sector workers for recruitment as informants via LinkedIn.
MI5 is also capable of being too sneaky: Surveyors from BT's mobile arm, EE, [13]nearly proposed installing a Huawei mobile mast on the roof of a secret agency data centre in West London. ®
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[1] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YIGdnKjrem54PLg65vedlQAAANM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[2] https://www.instagram.com/mi5official/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/06/facebook_ai_instagram/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/11/equipment_interference_privacy_international_judgment/
[5] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/04/21/keep-britain-safe-mi5-becoming-open/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YIGdnKjrem54PLg65vedlQAAANM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.thesun.co.uk/travel/10010846/cathay-pacific-influencer-banned-business-class-upgrade/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/11/equipment_interference_privacy_international_judgment/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/21/virtual_instagram_influencers/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2020/02/26/mi5_chief_itv_interview/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YIGdnKjrem54PLg65vedlQAAANM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/20/linkedin_10000_uk_russia_china/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/26/huawei_mobile_mast_secret_mi5_data_centre/
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Is this a joke?
There's also Matt's take:
[1]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/31/matt-cartoons-april-2021/matt-cartoon-april-21/
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/03/31/matt-cartoons-april-2021/matt-cartoon-april-21/
martini-drinking stereotypes
Is probably wrong for the people actually working there.
My experience of similar secret-squirrel stuff n the 90s is that the bosses may be Sir Humphreys because they were all hired 40 years before.
The interns were all Oxbridge because that's the only place you would look because there aren't any other universities. But the staff were all much more polytech / no-degree just because they had junior civil-service pay scales
Hard to recruit the best Oxbridge computer scientists and mathematicians when you were paying 10% of what the city was handing out to rocket scientists even back then.
The funniest part was that as pay was only by civll-service grade, the only way to do incentive pay to get certain skills was to promote them. So you had a bunch of fresh graduates with experience in certain high-speed chippery being given head-of-dept rank along with all the access to executive dining washroom perks - which really upset the Sir Humphreys.
Re: martini-drinking stereotypes
A lot of the grunts are just that, ex military types looking for an office job.
The 'hostile countries' were more likely than not, using LinkedIn as a filter, i.e. anyone with a so called intelligence background posting on there would be put on to the Avoid list.
Well, that shake up ...
is going to stir things up a bit!
Is this a joke?
If you visit an Instagram account then they will have all your details ... I think most people are aware that this is how it works these days, but maybe they will be looking at global data collections and saying, "Oh look, this person never visits our social media accounts so they must be up to something to make sure we don't collect their data, we need to investigate..."