An unexpected contact on LinkedIn. An offer of work from a recruiter, most likely a young woman, based in China. The chance to make perhaps £20,000 on the side writing a handful of geopolitical reports for a firm from China peppered with “non-public” or privileged information. Payment in digital currency or physical money favored.
It may seem obvious, in this scenario, that something about this approach would be amiss. Nevertheless, China’s powerful intelligence agency continues to view it valuable to deploy headhunters to attempt this – prompting MI5 to warn repeatedly about their operations online.
Large-Scale Contact Attempts on Professional Networks
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum stated operatives from China were approaching UK citizens on LinkedIn on an extraordinary level, at a frequency of ten thousand over the preceding two and a half years, attempting to obtain governmental, commercial, defense and technological classified information. However a fresh initiative targeting elected officials and Westminster has prompted the intelligence service to act again.
An espionage warning was issued on Tuesday via the administrative teams of the Commons speaker and his House of Lords counterpart: a brief presentation after the repeated efforts of certain individuals and Amanda Qiu to reach out to MPs, lords, their staffers, economists, thinktanks – anyone who might become a source.
Security Strategy and Legislative Changes
In the curious style of British intelligence, there was no publication of the security advice from the agency or the interior ministry. Yet the agency was aware its advisory document would leak once it was emailed out to Westminster. Sharing it in the press assists the wider public more easily recognize interactions with a fraudulent intent.
The alert has the impact of flushing out additional details from in and around Westminster, although that is not MI5’s main objective. The agency aims for public figures to recognize that just because interactions on LinkedIn are not as toxic as on other social platforms, it does not mean they are completely safe.
Nor is internal security service understood to have been reacting to any specific incident in the legislature, though the burst of activity does come after the embarrassing collapse of the prosecution of a former parliamentary aide Christopher Cash and his friend Christopher Berry on a technicality earlier in the autumn.
Both individuals had been accused of working for China – a charge they rejected – but failure to complete a trial under the since replaced Official Secrets Act led to warnings that the UK's political system had been left unprotected.
Revised Laws and China's Strategic Interests
Legislation has since been updated, and the security briefing contains a reminder of its replacement: “Individuals involved in spying operations risk significant legal consequences under the new security law.” This constitutes a crime if a person engages in behavior that is or is likely to “materially assist a foreign intelligence service”.
An obvious inquiry, however, is what China has to gain. An elected representative who is not a government minister will have limited knowledge of sensitive information, and an associate of theirs less so. Yet the Chinese government is particularly focused in parliament: for a period, in recent years, the UK’s China policy on issues such as the telecom firm or the Uyghur repression or alleged atrocities was being influenced by MPs.
Cultural Variations and Ongoing Cyber Threats
To a degree there are distinct approaches as well. Authoritarian governments like Beijing's utilize information gathering techniques and the size of its intelligence apparatus is enormous, employing three hundred thousand people. A former US official, a American cybersecurity head under president Joe Biden, said it was sometimes estimated that “the Chinese have greater linguistic capacity involved 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 agencies have struggled to differentiate legitimate relationships and espionage. “Beijing has a minimal requirement for what information is deemed to be of value,” security minister a government official told MPs on Wednesday, but a rapid shift in the political cycle may result in someone rapidly peripheral becomes important.
Another way to consider the continuous efforts at covert intelligence collection is in the wider context of the geopolitical contest between China and the west at a threshold below the point of outright war. The nation has increased its cyber operations, with the Salt Typhoon penetration of communications systems in 80 countries, and the Volt Typhoon compromise of millions connected equipment.
Beijing is involved in relentless efforts to find covert sources on British democracy online because it seeks to be challenging, to demonstrate power and because it can.
