Cybersecurity

GCHQ uses Instagram to 'open up world of espionage' to public

After years of secretly hoovering up metadata about millions of citizens, Britain’s spy agency has made its public foray into one of the growing sources for such information by opening its own Instagram account.

GCHQ’s account on the photo-sharing site claims the agency will provide a glimpse into its secret world. Its first post acknowledges GCHQ’s institutional suspicion about openness by including a photograph of the border fence with a “no photography” sign attached.

The account is part of GCHQ’s expanding presence on social media, and comes two years after it opened a Twitter account, which has 75,000 followers.

Such public online socialising is designed to put a friendly gloss over the agency’s more covert activities. Leaks by Edward Snowden, a whistleblower who worked for the GCHQ’s US counterpart, revealed that GCHQ collects and stores vast quantities of data about individuals, including Facebook posts.

The number of Instagram users worldwidetopped a billion this year. This is still less than half that for the parent company, Facebook, but Instagram is more popular among younger people. The Pew Research Center found that 51% of US teenagers use Facebook, compared with 72% who use Instagram.