Secret MI6 agents have cover blown online

The Foreign Office has slammed a privacy activist who has named online over 200 alleged UK spies and secret agents.

New York-based activist John Young has named 276 alleged MI6 agents - including former Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown - on his Cryptome website. The list claims Ashdown was an MI6 agent in Geneva in the 1970s.

It is not the first time this kind of information has been published on the internet and Foreign Office policy is to neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of such lists. But a spokesman slammed its publication for potentially putting lives in danger.

"It puts members of the intelligence community in the field at risk and also people who are just ordinary Foreign Office workers who may be named on the list," he told silicon.com.

The spokesman admitted that the nature of the internet would make it difficult to force the material to be taken down and said any such action would be a matter for the US authorities.

Young publishes on his website top-secret documents revealing intelligence information he believes is in the public interest.

"No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here - or elsewhere if gagged by order," a note on his site says.