A surprising contact on LinkedIn. An offer of employment from a recruiter, most likely a young woman, based in China. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 on the side writing a small number of geopolitical reports for a firm from China containing confidential or privileged information. Payment in cryptocurrency or physical money preferred.
It might appear clear, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss. Nevertheless, Beijing's influential intelligence agency still considers it worthwhile to deploy recruitment consultants to try it – leading MI5 to issue multiple warnings about their activity online.
Large-Scale Contact Attempts on Social Media
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum stated operatives from China were contacting Britons on LinkedIn on an unprecedented scale, at a rate of 10,000 over the previous two and a half years, seeking political, industrial, military and scientific classified information. But a fresh campaign targeting elected officials and Westminster has led the intelligence service to act again.
A spying alert was issued on this week via the offices of the Commons speaker and his House of Lords counterpart: a single slide after the persistent attempts of Shirly Shen and Amanda Qiu to reach out to MPs, peers, their staffers, economists, research organizations – anybody who might provide information.
Security Approach and Legal Changes
In the typical manner of UK security services, there was no publication of the protective guidance from the agency or the interior ministry. Yet the service knew its briefing note would leak once it was sent electronically out to Westminster. Sharing it in the media assists the general population better identify communications with a fraudulent intent.
This warning has the impact of flushing out additional details from in and around parliament, though that is not the agency's main objective. The agency aims for people in public life to recognize that simply because exchanges on LinkedIn are less overtly risky as on other social platforms, it does not mean they are without risk.
Nor is internal security service understood to have been reacting to any specific incident in the legislature, although the burst of activity does come after the awkward failure of the legal case of a former parliamentary aide an individual and his associate Christopher Berry on a legal detail in recent months.
Both individuals had been accused of spying for the foreign power – a charge they rejected – but inability to successfully conclude a prosecution under the since replaced previous legislation led to warnings that British democracy had been left unprotected.
Updated Laws and China's Long-Term Interests
The law has now been changed, and the security briefing includes a reminder of its successor: “Individuals involved in spying operations face substantial criminal penalties under the new security law.” It is a crime if somebody engages in conduct that is or is likely to “materially assist a overseas spy agency”.
A natural question, however, is what China 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. But Beijing is also interested in the legislative body: for a period, in recent years, the UK’s approach to China on matters such as Huawei or the human rights situation or alleged atrocities was being influenced by MPs.
Methodological Variations and Persistent Cyber Threats
In part there are cultural differences too. Autocratic regimes like Beijing's export information gathering methods and the size of its intelligence apparatus is vast, engaging three hundred thousand people. A former US official, a American cybersecurity head under president Joe Biden, commented 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 sometimes even the intelligence services have found it difficult to distinguish between legitimate relationships and spying. “Beijing has a minimal requirement for what information is considered to be useful,” security minister a government official informed parliamentarians on Wednesday, but a sudden turn in the political cycle may result in an individual rapidly peripheral becomes significant.
An alternative perspective to consider the continuous efforts at covert information gathering is in the wider context of the geopolitical contest between Beijing and the Western nations at a level below the point of direct conflict. The nation has increased its hacking efforts, with the one campaign penetration of phone and data networks in 80 countries, and the another operation compromise of countless internet devices.
Beijing is involved in persistent efforts to identify secret informants on British democracy online because it seeks to be challenging, to demonstrate influence and because it can.
