It was a great job while it lasted (1)
The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details on the Facebook website.
Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence Service in November, putting him in charge of all Britain’s spying operations abroad.
But his wife’s entries on the social networking site have exposed potentially compromising details about where they live and work, who their friends are and where they spend their holidays.
Amazingly, she had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, making it visible to any of the site’s 200million users who chose to be in the open-access ‘London’ network – regardless of where in the world they actually were.
There are fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder may have compromised the safety of Sir John’s family and friends.
Lady Shelley Sawers’ extraordinary lapse exposed the couple’s friendships with senior diplomats and well-known actors, including Moir Leslie, who plays a leading character in The Archers. And it revealed that the intelligence chief’s brother-in-law – who holidayed with him last month – is an associate of the controversial Right-wing historian David Irving.
Immediately after The Mail on Sunday alerted the Foreign Office to the astonishing misjudgment, all trace of the material – which could potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists – was removed from the internet.
The move suggests that MI6 or the Foreign Office, which is also responsible for the GCHQ electronic eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, had not vetted what sort of information Sir John and his family were distributing over the internet.
[More]
Update:
2:34 pm EDT, January 5th, 2009 — MI6 chief’s Facebook Speedo photos ‘no state secret’: Milliband
Popularity: 19% [?]
Male, retired and the rest is of little interest to anyone. The site keeps me busy and if it helps others to stay abreast of daily events then my time is well spent.
Cynapse Says:
Hehe, Facebook. It’s killed so many careers.
I’m addicted to some of the games, but my main/known profile has been pretty sanitized of details (including all photos) over the past year.
Facebook is also still a great spam-free method of communicating both in “email” and real-time. The rest of it (especially pictures) present some serious security problems. Is it true that OPP aren’t even allowed to have profiles?
Posted on July 5th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
Jack Says:
“Is it true that OPP aren’t even allowed to have profiles?”
Don’t know. I’ve been out of it for awhile but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Posted on July 5th, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Mac Says:
The Mounties initially told employees to stay away from social networking. Now they say “use common sense” which, as we know, isn’t so common nowadays. There’s been a couple of small incidents but…
Posted on July 5th, 2009 at 11:29 pm