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MI6 reveals 'Silent Courier' dark web portal upgrade it hopes will help it recruit new spies. YouTube vids explain digital tradecraft to reach spooks over Tor or VPN without blowing your cover. The UK’s Secret Intelligence Service, aka MI6, has created a dark web portal called “Silent Courier” that it hopes would-be foreign informants will find a suitably secure means of sharing secrets. MI6 revealed the portal in a late Thursday statement that reportedly included a quote from Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper, who said the portal will help “recruit new spies for the UK - in Russia and around the world.” Instructions for interested spies appeared earlier today in eight languages on MI6’s new YouTube channel in a video that opens with an unidentified narrator saying “For over a hundred years, the bedrock of MI6's work has been face to face. Meeting, sharing insights, making connections.” “Now we can make those connections even more securely online using our upgraded dark web portal, Silent Courier,” the narrator continues. “Benefiting from the anonymity built into Tor, Silent Courier allows anyone, anywhere in the world to make safe direct contact with MI6.” “So if you have access to sensitive information relating to global instability or hostile intelligence activity, you can now contact MI6 and share this securely.” Here’s the (silent) instructions vid. It recommends contacting MI6 over Tor at mi6govukbfxe5pzxqw3otzd2t4nhi7v6x4dljwba3jmsczozcolx2vqd.onion. If accessing Tor is not possible – some nations block it – MI6 suggests using a free trial of a commercial VPN to reach its Contact Us form, and providing an email address you establish just for chats with spies. Don’t use a credit card when signing up for that VPN, or any information that could identify you, friends, or family. Do obtain a clean device that’s up to date with recent patches, and use a browser’s incognito mode to prevent recording a browsing history. Youtube Video MI6’s vids say the agency “will carefully consider all information passed to us.” So hello there, real_James_Bond_007_honest@gmail.com, welcome to MI6’s new informant recruitment program. The Register hopes you’re really interested in helping His Majesty’s government to keep the nation secure, and not a troll or a minion sent by Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin to DDOS MI6 by sending it a flood of information so tantalizing its operatives are overwhelmed. Or maybe that’s one point of the exercise, in the hope that malicious foreign actors who use the site inadvertently reveal some of their tradecraft.