Britain's SIS creates website

• LONDON: From now on, the world is officially licensed to log on as Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), colloquially known as the glamorous MI6 that employed 007 James Bond, officially brings its spies out of the shadows and on to the world wide web in a move that underlines secrecy is no longer everything when intelligence-gathering for the 'war on terror'.
• The MI6 homepage, launched on Thursday to waggish questions of "how can a secret service have a website", comes just a few years after the organisation's existence was officially admitted for the first time.
• Intelligence experts said the website, which admits SIS "provides the British government with a global covert capability to promote and defend the national security and economic well-being of the United Kingdom" takes Western intelligence-gathering into a bold new phase of openness and mass recruitment.
• The website is thought to sound the deathknell for Britain's time-honoured traditional method of recruiting spies, notably a nod and a wink from Oxbridge tutors or a nudge and a push at the best gentleman's club in London.
• Now, MI6 admits the website is aimed at boosting recruitment "at all grades" and especially among Britain's 6.5 per cent coloured, linguistically and religiously diverse ethnic minorities to counter the heightened terrorist threat.
• This is why the MI6 website showcases the fictional "operational officer profile" of a female, 27-year old East African Indian Muslim immigrant to the UK, who trained as a lawyer and then decided "to make more of her interest in international politics".