Global power is increasingly being transferred from politicians to tech companies and their owners, Britain’s new spy chief has warned.
Blaise Metreweli, who took charge of MI6 in September, introduced herself to the public in her first speech on Monday, detailing her belief in technology’s importance in responding to new threats.
She warned about the dangers to society from online algorithms, which are key to the global power struggle for control of information.
Her view in part stems from her previous role as MI5’s ‘Q’ in charge of developing top-of-the-range spy equipment.
Elon Musk
Careful not to mention any Big Tech billionaires by name, Metreweli nonetheless made the dominance of individuals who control large-scale social media platforms central to her argument about the changing nature of the threat to the UK and society.
“We’re now operating in a space between peace and war,” she said in a speech to reporters in MI6’s Vauxhall HQ. “This is not a temporary state or a gradual, inevitable evolution. Our world is being actively remade with profound implications for national and international security.”
“Power itself is becoming more diffuse, more unpredictable as control over these technologies is shifting from states to corporations and sometimes to individuals,” she said.
Britian’s politicians and leaders of its spy agencies are being forced to respond to a generational shift in who controls information – and more importantly, disinformation.
Along with overseeing a major social platform, Musk manages key infrastructure such as Starlink satellites which provide crucial internet access for guided weapons in Ukraine, AI via xAI, and space tech through Space X.
He also briefly advised Donald Trump, on whom he spent at least £220 million to secure the Republican’s presidential win in 2024.
Now, under Musk’s watch, X has taken several steps to obscure who is behind the algorithms driving its traffic.
A recent report by the European Commission found X blocked independent researchers from accessing public data and charged prohibitive fees for limited access to its programming database, making it difficult to study misinformation patterns.
Meanwhile it has refused to maintain a reliable database on who advertises on the site, obscuring who is paying for influence.
He has also used the platform to interfere in UK domestic issues, such as by backing the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson
The European Union has also fined the platform for its misleading blue checkmarks allowing anyone to become “verified.” In retaliation X blocked the Commission fromtaking adverts on its platform and Musk called for the abolition of the European Union.
Mark Zuckerberg
Meanwhile, Meta-owner Mark Zuckerberg has faced criticism from whistleblowers. Some have accused the company, which runs Facebook, Instagram and Threads, of obscuring the truth and withholding internal data about the negative impacts of their algorithms including amplifying hate speech, climate misinformation, and content promoting self-harm because it often drives high engagement. Zuckerberg has denied the allegations.
“The foundations of trust in our societies are eroding,” Metreweli said. “Information, once a unifying force, is increasingly weaponised. Falsehoods spread faster than fact, dividing communities and distorting reality. We live in an age of hyper-connection yet profound isolation. The algorithms flatter our biases and fracture our public squares. And as trust collapses, so does our shared sense of truth, one of the greatest losses a society can suffer.”
“The defining challenge of the 21st 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,” she added.
Even though she is operationally independent of the Government, Metreweli did not go much further than the frustrations ministers have levelled at Musk’s interference in British politics.
Russia “is dragging out negotiations” over Ukraine
Unlike her predecessors in the role as ‘C’ as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Metreweli declined to give a “global threat tour” to highlight the dangers from around the world, instead focusing on Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin “is dragging out negotiations and shifting the cost of war onto his own population,” she said. But she added, “Putin should be in no doubt, our support is enduring. The pressure we apply on Ukraine‘s behalf will be sustained.”
Her commitment came after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky offered to drop Ukraine’s ambition to join Nato ahead of the latest peace talks in Berlin. He said Kyiv could forgo Nato membership in return for legally binding Western security guarantee, calling the proposal “already a compromise”.
“We all continue to face the menace of an aggressive, expansionist and revisionist Russia, seeking to subjugate Ukraine and harass Nato members. I find it harrowing that hundreds of thousands have died, with the toll mounting every day, because of Putin’s historical distortions and his compromised desire for respect,” she said.
Metreweli listed cyberattacks on UK critical infrastructure, drones “buzzing” airports and military bases, aggressive activity in our seas, state-sponsored arson and sabotage alongside propaganda and influence operations that “crack open and exploit fractures” within societies as examples of attacks just below the level of open warfare.
“Alongside the grinding war, Russia is testing us in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war. It’s important to understand their attempts to bully, fearmonger and manipulate, because it affects us all,” she added.
Personal back-story
As it was her first public speech, Metreweli opened up a little about her background. Her childhood was partly spent in Hong Kong and she was educated in the UK.
But her family past is complicated because of her grandfather, a Ukrainian called Constantine Dobrowolski. He became a key Nazi informant in Chernihiv. Known as “The Butcher,” he boasted of killing Jews. The Russian Foreign Ministry and state media have repeatedly used her grandfather’s history to launch verbal attacks, attempting to undermine her credibility.
Dobrowolski’s wife and infant son fled to Britain where the son later took the surname Metreweli after his stepfather. The MI6 chief never met her grandfather who stayed in Nazi-occupied Ukraine when his family ran from the Red Army’s liberation of the region in 1943.
On Monday the spy chief said she was from a “family shaped by devastating conflict, I grew up with a deep sense of gratitude for the UK’s precious democracy and freedom.”
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She is the first female head of MI6 since the organisation’s precursor was founded in 1909. Unlike its sister spy agencies, MI6 had never had a woman in the top job. Domestic intelligence agency MI5 has previously been led by Dame Stella Rimington and Baroness Manningham-Buller, and the head of the government cyber-spying agency GCHQ is Anne Keast-Butler, its first female leader.
Metreweli is known to colleagues as C, derived from former leader Captain Mansfield Cumming, who always signed his letters “C” for his last name, in green ink. The tradition – and the green ink – stuck.
C is the agency’s only officer who is publicly “avowed” or acknowledged and makes occasional speeches at home and on panels abroad on the threats from terrorism, cyber-attacks, and hostile states. In the James Bond franchise C, in the guise of M, has been played by Dame Judi Dench.
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