MI5 joins Instagram in new era of openness

The head of MI5 has ushered in a new era of openness, laying out a blueprint for the intelligence agency for the next decade that includes joining social media for the first time. 

Writing exclusively in The Telegraph, Ken McCallum, MI5’s youngest ever director-general, said it was time to cast off any “Martini-drinking stereotypes” and that it would be a “dangerous vanity” for the organisation to try to work “inside its own bubble”.

Instead, Mr McCallum promised Britain’s domestic intelligence service would “become a more open and connected organisation”.

In the first ever opinion piece written solely by an MI5 director-general for a national newspaper, Mr McCallum said that the secret service had a “need to engage” with the public, academia and private sector companies, adding: “That is why being more open is a crucial part of MI5’s approach in the 2020s.”

The strategic decision to promote MI5 more widely includes the agency making its “slightly belated debut on social media” on Instagram, the social networking site used to share photographs and videos by its one billion users. Instagram is used by a much younger audience than Facebook, which owns it.

He said Instagram offered MI5 an opportunity for “finding new ways to tap into diversity and creativity of UK life” by “reaching out directly” to the public. He said he believed “our open approach … will make a difference to our ability to keep the country safe”.

The MI5 Instagram account will allow followers to take part in online Q&A sessions with serving intelligence officers, who will provide information on what it’s like to direct a group of agents and be a surveillance officer.

It will also promote careers, “bust popular myths”, and include previously unseen archive material taken from the MI5 museum held in its basement.

Mr McCallum, who was appointed to the job last year at the age of 45, admitted the spy agency’s decision to launch its account on social media may be “routine” for most organisations but “more interesting when you’re in the business of keeping secrets”.

It took the agency until 1993 to publicly acknowledge Dame Stella Rimington as its then chief and it remains the case that only the director-general is publicly avowed.

In The Telegraph, Mr McCallum said the agency needed to continue to attract a more diverse workforce, calling time on any "lingering" association intelligence agencies might have with James Bond, the archetypal British spy, who is white, male and Oxbridge-educated.

In a reference to his own upbringing, growing up in Glasgow and studying at the local university, Mr McCallum said MI5 would be “stronger” for recruiting people from “all kinds of places”, adding: “Including, crucially, people who have never thought of working somewhere like MI5.

“I was once one of those myself; growing up in Glasgow, it never crossed my mind that I’d end up working in national security, never mind in a senior role.”

He said he wanted to ensure that people were not deterred from joining the agency just because of their “socio-economic background, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, or which part of the country they happen to have been born in”.

He did not identify James Bond by name but in reference to the fictional spy’s favourite cocktail, said: “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.”

Mr McCallum explained that MI5 need not see it as a contradiction in its requirement to be more open while running covert intelligence operations out of necessity.

He said: “In an increasingly open and connected world, MI5, and any forward-thinking intelligence organisation, faces a dilemma. On the one hand, our ability to serve the public and keep the country safe depends critically on operating covertly.

“But the other half of the dilemma is that MI5’s ability to keep the country safe and resilient also depends on our reaching out to others who can help us, and whom we in turn can help.”

“We owe it to the public to be constantly striving to learn and improve; and in our fast-moving world, with technology advancing at incredible speed, it would be dangerous vanity to imagine MI5 can build all the capabilities it needs inside its own bubble.”

He said “collaborating with all sorts of talented people elsewhere” turned “what can look like a dilemma … [into] a vivid opportunity”.

The choice of Instagram may raise eyebrows over its ownership by Facebook. As recently as this week, Facebook was condemned by Priti Patel, the Home Secretary with oversight of MI5, for new encryption measures which she said would make it harder for law enforcement agencies to catch paedophiles.

MI5 has also frequently criticised social media and Mr McCallum recognised that.

In his Telegraph article, he alluded to the need for tech companies to do more to “combat damaging State-backed disinformation, and to ensure that terrorists cannot use their platforms to plot or encourage terrorist acts”.

But he also praised social media firms for their ability to keep people in touch, all the more crucial during the pandemic.

MI5 has previously vowed to improve the diversity of its employees, although it already draws a higher proportion of its 5,000 staff from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) backgrounds (at 8.6 per cent) compared with 3.1 per cent at GCHQ and 7.7 per cent at MI6.

Most recent figures show 43 per cent of staff are women with a target to increase that to 45 per cent by the end of the year. MI5 has followed GCHQ and MI6 onto Instagram, while Richard Moore, the MI6 chief, began using Twitter in his official capacity last year.