14 DAY TRIAL // The wife of Sir John Sawers, who was appointed to head the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) starting this November, has leaked a huge amount of personal and sensitive information through her Facebook profile. Pictures of the couple, their children and other family members, as well as the identities of their closest friends, including some high-profile ones, were available for over 200 million users to see.
Sir John Sawers, who will soon turn 54 years old, is said to have started his early career in the MI6, but he is better known today as a diplomat. Since August 2007 he is Britain's permanent representative to the United Nations, where he sits on the Security Council.
It has become a matter of public knowledge that Sir Sawers has been appointed to head the MI6 beginning November 2009, a positions that involves one of the highest levels of security clearance and can obviously attract a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, Lady Sawers doesn't seem to have realized the responsibility and risks that come with this job when she made her Facebook profile information available to the entire London geographic network.
And, as if the four million users that this group has weren't enough, it's worth mentioning that virtually any Facebook user, regardless of where they live in the world, can join the London geographic network. This means that information such as the names, photos and whereabouts of the couple's children, the apartment the couple lives in, the identities of their parents and close friends, where they spend their holidays and much more, was widely available to over 200 million people.
"Normally, I would welcome greater openness in Government for officials or politicians but this type of exposure verges on the reckless. The Prime Minister should immediately commission an internal inquiry as to whether this has breached the security of the incoming head of MI6 too seriously to allow him to take up the post," Edward Davy, the Liberal Democrat Foreign Affairs spokesman, commented for The Mail on Sunday.
The Mail on Sunday were the first to notice the major security blunder and alert the British Foreign Office. Soon after, all traces of Lady Shelley Sawers' account were erased from Facebook, but a fair amount of information and pictures are still available on other websites.
"Lady Shelley Sawers certainly seems to have learnt that lesson. […] But don't forget that leaky social networking profiles aren't just a security issue for spy chiefs and their families. Millions of home users and office workers may be sharing too much information online, and being careless with their privacy settings - potentially allowing all kinds of unwelcome people to gather information about you," Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, advises.