The world wide web has been left both shaken and stirred by the decision of MI5 to infiltrate the realm of Instagram. No one can miss the irony of an intelligence organization making its social media debut in the name of transparency. Is secrecy no longer cool for the secret agent? Britain’s domestic intelligence agency is known for its functions of spying and keeping secrets, performed — at least in the popular imagination — by suave, tuxedoed men drinking martinis. But rushing to follow MI5 on Instagram in the hopes of smouldering selfies of secret agents might not bear fruit. “Martini-drinking stereotypes” are exactly what the MI5 is trying to debunk, according to its director-general. The aim, apparently, is to paint a picture of inclusion, encouraging citizens irrespective of socio-economic background, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, disability, and so on to see themselves as possible recruits. This is significant in light of the fact that a 2018 parliamentary committee report strongly criticized the United Kingdom’s spy agencies for failing to assimilate the notion of modern Britain in their rank and file: women and ethnic minorities in senior positions were too few.

The MI5, though, is not the only intelligence agency on Instagram, or social media for that matter. Be it the Central Intelligence Agency or the Mossad, social media is teeming with spies. However, those looking to be thrilled would be sorely disappointed. Tweets and posts on their social media sites include recruitment ads, the occasional puzzle, retweets from intelligence officials, and attempts at jokes. But all of this may not be as benign as it seems. An independent study conducted at the University of Colorado suggests that a lot of what intelligence agencies do on these platforms is patently ugly business. As such, appearing ‘cool’ or ‘funny’ — the CIA’s first tweet was “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet” — is essentially a way of airbrushing troubling legacies. It only grows curiouser and curiouser from here. The security service’s embracing of Instagram comes days after it warned that social media was being used on “an industrial scale” by rogue States and organized crime to mine personal data and target people.

In a world where lives are increasingly being bared online, intelligence gathering cannot remain indifferent to social media. What is worrying though is that they have at their disposal tools that can make snooping on these platforms equivalent to infringements on citizens’ privacy. In 2015, an intelligence and security committee report — it was almost immediately redacted — revealed that intelligence agencies in the UK were collecting not only targeted data on specific suspects but also information from the general public. Over the past decade, online open-source intelligence has become a significant source of actionable data. Social media has been used to identify suspects and key eyewitnesses to some of the most notable cases worldwide. This is likely to reaffirm the double life of social media and of secret services. On the one hand, they are being transformed into repositories of information that is public even as they, in turn, are mining public data secretly while the people remain glued to Instagram.