The first public address by the new head of the overseas intelligence service is one of several recent documents and announcements that have offered visitors new language options, PublicTechnology learns
Several recent announcements from the Secret Intelligence Service published on GOV.UK have offered visitors to the government website a Russian translation of the information, PublicTechnology can reveal.
This includes the press release put out this week concerning the first public speech made by Blaise Metreweli, the recently appointed head of the service – commonly referred to as MI6.
In the top right-hand corner of the media announcement posted online is a button allowing users to toggle between English- and Russian-language versions of the release (pictured below right). This is the third time in the last few months that an online posting from MI6 – or its overseeing department, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – has come with a Russian translation.
In September, ambassador Neil Holland, the head of the UK’s delegation to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, made a speech strongly condemning the Kremlin’s “repeated use of offensive and historically loaded terms” and the “references to Nazism [that] have become a fixture of Russia’s statements”.
The full transcript of the speech posted online by the government comes with a Russian translation.
Also offering a version for Russian-speaking users was another September press release from MI6, which announced the creation of Silent Courier, a new dark web portal to support the recruitment of spies for the UK. Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said that the new platform has been created “so MI6 can recruit new spies for the UK – in Russia and around the world”.
PublicTechnology contacted the FCDO requesting comment on the rationale and intended benefits of including online Russian translation of intelligence announcements, as well as whether doing so will become a matter of course for MI6 releases and speeches going forward.
The department had not responded at time of going to press.
‘An aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia’
In her speech this week, Metreweli said that she would “break with tradition and won’t give you a global threat tour – but will focus here on Putin’s Russia”. She reiterated the UK’s support for Ukraine and NATO in the face of “the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia”.
“Alongside the grinding war, Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war,” she said. “It’s important to understand their attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate, because it affects us all. I am talking about: cyberattacks on critical infrastructure; drones buzzing airports and bases; aggressive activity in our seas, above and below the waves; state-sponsored arson and sabotage; propaganda and influence operations that crack open and exploit fractures within societies.”
Metreweli added: “Countering this activity is the work of intelligence and security services across Europe and the globe. And as the Foreign secretary made clear in a speech last week, the UK is defending itself against this Russian information warfare – sanctioning Russian media outlets pushing Kremlin narratives. The export of chaos is a feature not a bug in this Russian approach to international engagement; and we should be ready for this to continue until Putin is forced to change his calculus. So, how should we respond? It’s not enough now just to understand the world. We must shape it too.”
“The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom.”
Blaise Metreweli, MI6 head
Elsewhere, the MI6 head claimed that “we are now operating in a space between peace and war” and that “our world is being actively remade, with profound implications for national and international security” – with technology at the heart of this transformation.
She said: “There’s something distinctive that will make this change unlike any other: the impact of advanced technologies, which will accelerate the pace and scale of every threat and opportunity, and increasingly, individualise them too. Advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and quantum computing are not only revolutionising economies but rewriting the reality of conflict, as they ‘converge’ to create science-fiction-like tools.”
The intelligence chief said that there is both “promise… and peril” in emergence of new technologies, and that “power itself is becoming more diffuse [and] more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations, and sometimes to individuals”.
Metreweli added: “The defining challenge of the twenty-first century is not simply who wields the most powerful technologies, but who guides them with the greatest wisdom. Our security, our prosperity, and our humanity depend on it. Our world is being remade. And for the first time, we are all at the heart of it.”
