A surprising contact on the professional network. A proposal of employment from a headhunter, probably a young woman, based in China. The chance to earn perhaps £20,000 part-time preparing a small number of geopolitical analyses for a firm from China peppered with “non-public” or “insider” information. Payment in digital currency or physical money preferred.
It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this method would be suspicious. Nevertheless, China’s influential Ministry of State Security still considers it worthwhile to use headhunters to try it – prompting the domestic spy agency to issue multiple warnings about their activity online.
Massive Approaches on Social Media
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum stated Chinese agents were contacting UK citizens on the platform on an extraordinary scale, at a frequency of 10,000 over the preceding 30-month period, seeking political, commercial, defense and scientific secrets. However a fresh initiative aimed at politicians and parliament has prompted the spy agency to act again.
An espionage warning was issued on Tuesday via the offices of the Commons speaker and his House of Lords counterpart: a single slide after the repeated efforts of Shirly Shen and other operatives to contact MPs, lords, their staffers, economists, research organizations – anyone who might become a source.
Intelligence Approach and Legislative Changes
In the typical manner of British intelligence, there was no official release of the protective guidance from the agency or the interior ministry. Yet the service knew its briefing note would leak once it was emailed out to Westminster. Republishing it in the media helps the general population better identify interactions with a deceptive intent.
This warning has the effect of flushing out additional details from within parliament, though that is not MI5’s main objective. The service wants people in public life to recognize that just because exchanges on professional networks are less overtly risky as on other social platforms, it does not mean they are completely safe.
Nor is domestic spy agency understood to have been responding to a particular event in parliament, though the burst of activity does come after the embarrassing failure of the prosecution of a former parliamentary aide an individual and his associate Christopher Berry on a technicality in recent months.
Both individuals had been accused of working for China – a charge they denied – but failure to complete a prosecution under the now repealed previous legislation led to concerns that the UK's political system had been left unprotected.
Updated Laws and China's Long-Term Goals
The law has now been changed, and the MI5 slide includes a note of its successor: “Individuals involved in espionage activity face significant criminal penalties under the new security law.” It is a crime if somebody participates in behavior that is or is likely to “significantly help a overseas spy agency”.
A natural inquiry, though, is what Beijing has to achieve. A politician who is outside ministerial roles will have limited access of sensitive information, and an associate of theirs less so. Yet Beijing is particularly focused in the legislative body: for a time, in 2020 and 2021, the UK’s China policy on issues such as the telecom firm or the Uyghur repression or alleged atrocities was being influenced by MPs.
Methodological Differences and Ongoing Digital Risks
To a degree there are distinct approaches too. Autocratic regimes like China’s export information gathering techniques and the scale of its spy network is enormous, employing three hundred thousand individuals. Chris Inglis, a US national cyber director under the US administration, said it was sometimes estimated that “China have more English speakers involved in this than Western agencies have personnel with language skills”.
The Chinese government is prepared to cultivate people over the long term and sometimes even the agencies have found it difficult to differentiate legitimate relationships and espionage. “Beijing has a low threshold for which details is considered to be of value,” security minister a government official told MPs on this week, but a sudden turn in the political cycle may mean someone rapidly marginal turning important.
Another way to consider the relentless efforts at secret information gathering is in the wider context of the geopolitical contest between Beijing and the west at a threshold under the level of outright war. China has stepped up its cyber operations, with the Salt Typhoon penetration of phone and data networks in numerous nations, and the another operation breach of countless connected equipment.
Beijing is involved in relentless attempts to identify secret informants on UK politics online because it wants to be provocative, to demonstrate power and because it can.
