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Britain's MI6 Opens Its First Website
An anonymous reader wites "Britain's spy agency the Secret Intelligence Service, known popularly as MI6, has opened its first website. While much about the agency is still not public, the website has information on service history and career opportunities for would-be spies. This rare peek at the real group popularized by the James Bond series brought over 3.5 million visits in its first few opening hours on Wednesday."
Their first web site that we know about.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Best bit of the website has to be the operational careers profiles, http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/Page74.html
James Bond, 42
"I love women and martinins so the 'SIS' flexible work hours suit me perfectly."
That feature of the site only works correctly in Internet Explorer
Perhaps my [British] english is a little rusty, but doesn't that translate roughly as:
:)
"This job is mostly tedious and boring work in places you never wanted to visit, but if you are lucky, perhaps you will make enough mistakes to get yourself into mortal danger."
Gee, where can I sign up?!!
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Through my family I've direct contact with people who have served in military intelligence. I know a few CSIS people and, I had the luck to spend ~14 hours locked in conversation with one of the architects of CSIS (he'd started out as a Polish citizen in WWII, was trained by what we came to know as the KGB, then he jumped ship to British Intelligence and finally came to Canada). He was an intelligent, insightful man but certainly far from a James Bond kind of a guy. His most telling trait, share by everyone I`ve met in the intelligence community, was a belief that things that needed to get done were best done covertly. I`ve been told that the best intelligence agents are inconspicuous. From everything I know I`d go with the "Danger Man" sort with the accent more on "The Prisoner".
The Russians in the Cold War were infamous for simply walking up to someone in the know at a cocktail party and innocuously asking pointed questions about sensitive material; the person being questioned might well be caught off guard by the social setting and laid back approach.
The only person I've known like a James Bond character was a Montreal vice cop who was an interpol agent, a martial arts expert and liked to review each violent episode he had lived through, but he wasn't anything like the intelligence people I've known. I doubt there are many, if any, James Bond types. There was a British sargent who, in the aftermath of WWII, was tasked with the assissination of deemed war criminals unlikely to be brought to justice. I saw him interviewed on the Discovery Channel. He was retired to a farm, spoke very unemotionaly about some of his excutions and showed a strong liking for Russian rifles as the then best assissination weapons. In the alternative, not to long ago, I met a British intelligence trained guy and while sharing a drink I brought up the subject of best gun for the job ( a 25 cal. in my opinion ). He dismissed the whole notion saying no one uses guns anymore. Theres a pin prick in your bottle of aftershave. You cut yourself shaving. Three months later you're dead.
cheers
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Uh oh, looks like the NSA needs to watch what gets made public on their site.
Crypto gear revealed!
Some of these links are kind of interesting. How many tax dollars have been spent on stuff like this (flash)?
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Maybe its because MI6.gov.uk really isnt their main site, just a simple redirect. http://www.sis.gov.uk/ Is actually their homepage.