International Law

Yet Another MI6 Secret Intelligence Service recruitment website

The spy business in the UK seems to be booming, at least so far as the creation of Flashy, if somewhat flawed, recruitment websites is concerned

There was a front page advertisement for MI6 Officers in The Guardian on Wednesday [hat tip to the Obsolete blog)] - see:

Guardian readers, Britain needs you
If nothing else, it's a good time to be a spy: it must be, MI6 is advertising on the front of the Guardian
* Richard Norton-Taylor
* guardian.co.uk,
* Wednesday August 20 2008 16:30 BST

This advert does not bother to point directly to the main MI6 / SIS website or to their www.siscareers.gov.uk website, which also includes vacancies does not bother with vacancies for technical IT and administration staff,

Incidentally, this website seems to be on a shared webserver, for which the SSL Digital Certificate has expired:

www.mi6careers.gov.uk uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is only valid for portal.qinetiq-tim.com
The certificate expired on 02/03/2008 23:59.

Exactly the same applies to the www.siscareers.gov.uk alias as well.

Given the amount of money they are spending on recruitment, is it really so difficult to pay for a current SSL Digital Certificate, to help to protect the confidential recruitment process from enemy snooping ?

Why is there still no SSL / TLS encrypted web form to allow people from around the world to securely contact the Secret Intelligence Service with intelligence tip offs, like even the MI5 Security Service or the US FBI or CIA websites have ?

Instead, there is now another website www.mi6officers.co.uk, which seems to have sub-contracted out to the BNB Recruitment Solutions plc. recruitment and outsourcing agency and their Flash happy recruitment meedja consultants TCS

What exactly is the justification for using a non ".gov.uk" domain name for this website ? Given the strong dual branding of both "SIS" and "MI6", why have these brand names (and the potential confidential recruitment process) not been protected by registering all the available combinations of "SIS" and "Mi6" and "officer(s)" etc. ? Surely it would have made more sense to keep this website within the ",gov.uk" domain name space to reduce the chances of fake recruitment CV phishing website attacks by foreign intelligence agencies etc.?

Apart from the use Flash (although, thankfully, there is a HTML version), the website also uses the large display touch screen mobile phone metaphor.

Full post as published by Spy Blog on August 21, 2008 (boomark / email).