An unexpected contact on LinkedIn. An offer of employment from a recruiter, probably a young woman, based in China. The opportunity to earn perhaps £20,000 part-time preparing a small number of geopolitical analyses for a firm from China peppered with “non-public” or privileged insights. Compensation in digital currency or physical money favored.
It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss. However, Beijing's influential Ministry of State Security still considers it valuable to use recruitment consultants to attempt this – prompting MI5 to issue multiple warnings about their operations online.
Large-Scale Approaches on Professional Networks
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum stated operatives from China were contacting UK citizens on LinkedIn on an unprecedented level, at a rate of 10,000 over the previous 30-month period, attempting to obtain political, commercial, military and scientific classified information. But a new initiative targeting elected officials and Westminster has led the intelligence service to take further action.
A spying alert was distributed on Tuesday via the offices of Lindsay Hoyle and his Lords equivalent: a brief presentation after the persistent attempts of certain individuals and other operatives to reach out to MPs, peers, their staffers, economists, research organizations – anybody who might become a source.
Security Strategy and Legal Changes
In the typical manner of British intelligence, there was no publication of the security advice from the agency or the Home Office. Yet the agency knew its advisory document would become public once it was sent electronically out to Westminster. Sharing it in the press assists the wider public more easily recognize interactions with a fraudulent intent.
The alert has the effect of flushing out more information from in and around Westminster, though that is not the agency's primary purpose. The agency wants public figures to recognize that just because exchanges on professional networks are less overtly risky as on other social platforms, it doesn't imply they are completely safe.
Nor is internal security service believed to have been reacting to a particular event in parliament, although the burst of activity does come after the awkward failure of the prosecution of a former parliamentary aide Christopher Cash and his associate Christopher Berry on a legal detail earlier in the autumn.
Both individuals had been accused of working for the foreign power – a allegation they denied – but failure to successfully conclude a trial under the now repealed Official Secrets Act led to concerns that British democracy had been left unprotected.
Updated Laws and China's Long-Term Goals
The law has now been changed, and the MI5 slide contains a note of its successor: “Those engaging in spying operations face significant legal consequences under the National Security Act.” This constitutes a crime if somebody participates in behavior that could potentially “materially assist a foreign intelligence service”.
An obvious inquiry, however, is what China has to achieve. A politician who is not a government minister will have limited knowledge of classified material, and an contact of theirs even less. Yet the Chinese government is particularly focused in the legislative body: for a time, in recent years, the Britain's approach to China on matters such as Huawei or the Uyghur repression or alleged atrocities was being driven by parliamentarians.
Cultural Variations and Ongoing Cyber Threats
To a degree there are cultural differences as well. Authoritarian governments like Beijing's export information gathering techniques and the scale of its intelligence apparatus is enormous, employing 300,000 people. A former US official, a American cybersecurity head under the US administration, said it was occasionally assessed that “the Chinese have greater linguistic capacity engaged in this than Western agencies have personnel with language skills”.
The Chinese government is willing to cultivate people over the long term and sometimes even the agencies have found it difficult to differentiate legitimate relationships and spying. “China has a low threshold for what information is deemed to be useful,” security minister a government official told MPs on Wednesday, but a sudden turn in the government situation may mean someone rapidly marginal becomes significant.
Another way to think about the relentless efforts at covert information gathering is in the wider context of the international competition between China and the Western nations at a level under the level of outright war. The nation has stepped up its hacking efforts, with the Salt Typhoon infiltration of communications systems in 80 countries, and the Volt Typhoon breach of countless internet devices.
Beijing is involved in relentless attempts to identify secret informants on UK politics via digital means because it seeks to be provocative, to display power and because it can.
