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Classified: MI6 set to recruit an extra 1,000 intelligence staff

The UK’s spy agency is set to bolster its ranks by 40% as it embarks on a modernisation drive to adapt with the digital age and significantly boost the government’s job creation statistics at the same time.

An extra 1,000 intelligence staff are to be recruited at MI6, swelling ranks at the Secret Intelligence Service to just under 3,500 as the agency grapples with the age of the internet and technology.

Quoting unnamed Whitehall sources, the BBC reports that MI6 is set to seal the vast majority of 1,900 new staff that the intelligence services were promised in the government’s 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, with the remaining 900 positions split among MI5, Government Communications Headquarters and Police Counter Terrorist Command.

With the ubiquity of social media and the internet in 21st Century Western society, it is becoming increasingly difficult for spy agencies to craft fake identities when every citizen inevitably leaves some trace of their lives on the internet at some point.

BBC Newsnight also adds that the widespread use of facial and image recognition technology, which allows anyone to reverse engineer an image, also poses significant challenges for those going incognito.

Citing fundamental challenges brought on by the ‘information revolution’, Alex Younger, who is chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, touched upon the issue in Washington DC on Tuesday.

He said: “The information revolution fundamentally changes our operating environment. In five years’ time there will be two sorts of intelligence services - those that understand this fact and have prospered, and those that don’t and haven’t. And I’m determined that MI6 will be in the former category.”

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