An unexpected connection on LinkedIn. A proposal of employment from a headhunter, probably a young woman, operating from China. The chance to earn around £20,000 part-time writing a handful of geopolitical reports for a firm from China containing “non-public” or privileged insights. Compensation in cryptocurrency or physical money preferred.
It might appear clear, on this telling, that an element about this approach would be amiss. However, Beijing's influential Ministry of State Security still considers it valuable to deploy headhunters to attempt this – leading the domestic spy agency to warn repeatedly about their activity on the internet.
Massive Approaches on Social Media
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum said Chinese agents were approaching UK citizens on the platform on an extraordinary scale, at a frequency of ten thousand over the previous two and a half years, attempting to obtain governmental, industrial, military and technological classified information. However a new initiative targeting elected officials and parliament has led the intelligence service to act again.
A spying warning was issued on Tuesday via the administrative teams of the Commons speaker and his Lords counterpart: a single slide after the repeated efforts of certain individuals and other operatives to contact MPs, lords, their assistants, economic experts, research organizations – anyone who might provide information.
Security Strategy and Legislative Changes
In the typical manner of British intelligence, there was no official release of the security advice from the agency or the Home Office. Yet the agency knew its advisory document would leak once it was sent electronically out to parliament. Republishing it in the press helps the wider public more easily recognize communications with a fraudulent purpose.
This warning has the effect of flushing out additional details from within Westminster, although that is not the agency's primary purpose. The agency wants people in public life to understand that simply because exchanges on professional networks are not as toxic as on other social platforms, it does not mean they are completely safe.
Additionally, the internal security service understood to have been responding to any specific incident in parliament, although the burst of activity does come after the embarrassing failure of the prosecution of a former parliamentary aide an individual and his friend another person on a technicality earlier in the autumn.
Both individuals had been charged of spying for China – a charge they rejected – but inability to successfully conclude a trial under the now repealed Official Secrets Act led to concerns that British democracy had been left unprotected.
Updated Legislation and China's Strategic Goals
The law has since been updated, and the security briefing contains a note of its replacement: “Those engaging in espionage activity risk substantial criminal penalties under the new security law.” This constitutes a crime if somebody engages in behavior that is or is likely to “materially assist a overseas spy agency”.
An obvious question, though, is what Beijing has to achieve. An elected representative who is outside ministerial roles will have restricted knowledge of sensitive information, and an associate of theirs less so. Yet Beijing is particularly focused in the legislative body: for a time, in recent years, the UK’s China policy on matters such as Huawei or the human rights situation or genocide was being influenced by MPs.
Methodological Variations and Persistent Digital Threats
In part there are cultural differences as well. Authoritarian governments like China’s utilize information gathering methods and the scale of its intelligence apparatus is vast, employing 300,000 people. A former US official, a US national cyber director under president Joe Biden, said it was sometimes estimated that “the Chinese have greater linguistic capacity engaged in this than we [western intelligence] have personnel with language skills”.
The Chinese government is willing to cultivate people over the extended period and at times even the intelligence services have found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate relationships and spying. “Beijing has a low threshold for what information is considered to be useful,” security minister a government official told MPs on this week, but a rapid shift in the political cycle may result in an individual rapidly peripheral becomes important.
Another way to consider the relentless activities at covert information gathering is in the wider context of the geopolitical contest between China and the Western nations at a level below the level of outright war. China has stepped up its cyber operations, with the Salt Typhoon penetration of phone and data networks in 80 countries, and the Volt Typhoon breach of millions connected equipment.
Chinese authorities is involved in persistent attempts to identify secret informants on British democracy online because it seeks to be challenging, to demonstrate power and because it has the capability.
