Security News > 2021 > April > MI5 wants to shed its cocktail-guzzling posho image – so it's opened an Instagram account
British domestic spy agency MI5 wants to dispel the idea it is staffed by martini-quaffing layabouts who spend implausible amounts of time lounging around top-end bars and hotels.
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 contributed towards Facebook's object-recognition AI project, given how the agency 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 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."
Exactly how an Instagram account achieves that wasn't explained; the platform is famous for influencers.
The odds of MI5 becoming an influencer are probably low, though perhaps some future incarnation of James Bond's Q could become a profitable robot influencer.
On the flip side, it does do some good in the world; earlier this week MI5's CPNI offshoot warned of hostile countries targeting British public-sector workers for recruitment as informants via LinkedIn.