Facebook's page on which the location of the head of MI6's flat was available has been taken down. You also can no longer find information about his family and their whereabouts, which you could on the site previously.
There has been a debate about this, of course. For Americans who aren't sure, MI5 is the British equivalent of the CIAS, more or less; MI5 deals with internal security while MI6 deals with external, although goodness knows the line must be blurred by now.
And over the weekend the story came out that our new head of MI5 had many personal details put online by his wife, on Facebook. They were taken down sharpish as you can imagine.
The Government is of course defending him, as you can see from this
BBC article. There are salient points in there. It's pointed out that our organised enemies probably didn't rely on Facebook for their information in the first place, which would be true enough. The fact that the guy wears Speedos on holiday is also not a surprise - anyone who's seen Casino Royale will be well aware that they're standard issue for the intelligence services.
I'm still uneasy, though. Of course the more serious terrorists would be able to find out stuff we wish they couldn't, that's how life is. But do we need to make it easy for them? And do we want someone at the head of our intelligence services who really doesn't see the problem?
