[ISN] MI6 chief blows his cover as wife's Facebook account reveals family holidays, showbiz friends and links to David Irving

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1197562/MI6-chief-blows-cover-wifes-Facebook-account-reveals-family-holidays-showbiz-friends-links-David-Irving.html

By Jason Lewis
The Daily Mail
05th July 2009

The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security 
breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details 
on the Facebook website.

Sir John Sawers is due to take over as chief of the Secret Intelligence 
Service in November, putting him in charge of all Britain's spying 
operations abroad.

But his wife's entries on the social networking site have exposed 
potentially compromising details about where they live and work, who 
their friends are and where they spend their holidays.

Amazingly, she had put virtually no privacy protection on her account, 
making it visible to any of the site's 200million users who chose to be 
in the open-access 'London' network - regardless of where in the world 
they actually were.

There are fears that the hugely embarrassing blunder may have 
compromised the safety of Sir John's family and friends.

Lady Shelley Sawers' extraordinary lapse exposed the couple's 
friendships with senior diplomats and well-known actors, including Moir 
Leslie, who plays a leading character in The Archers. And it revealed 
that the intelligence chief's brother-in-law - who holidayed with him 
last month - is an associate of the controversial Right-wing historian 
David Irving.

Immediately after The Mail on Sunday alerted the Foreign Office to the 
astonishing misjudgment, all trace of the material – which could 
potentially be useful to hostile foreign powers or terrorists - was 
removed from the internet.

The move suggests that MI6 or the Foreign Office, which is also 
responsible for the GCHQ electronic eavesdropping centre in Cheltenham, 
had not vetted what sort of information Sir John and his family were 
distributing over the internet.

[...]


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