A surprising contact on the professional network. An offer of employment from a headhunter, most likely a young woman, operating from the Asian nation. The opportunity to make perhaps £20,000 part-time writing a handful of political reports for a Chinese company containing confidential or “insider” information. Payment in digital currency or physical money preferred.
It may seem clear, in this scenario, that something about this method would be amiss. However, China’s powerful intelligence agency continues to view it worthwhile to deploy headhunters to try it – prompting the domestic spy agency to issue multiple warnings about their activity on the internet.
Large-Scale Contact Attempts on Social Media
Last year, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum said Chinese agents were approaching Britons on LinkedIn on an extraordinary level, at a rate of 10,000 over the preceding 30-month period, attempting to obtain political, industrial, military and scientific classified information. However a new campaign aimed at elected officials and parliament has led the intelligence service to take further action.
An espionage warning was issued on Tuesday via the administrative teams of Lindsay Hoyle and his House of Lords counterpart: a brief presentation after the repeated efforts of Shirly Shen and Amanda Qiu to contact MPs, lords, their staffers, economists, thinktanks – anybody who might become a source.
Security Strategy and Legislative Changes
In the typical style of UK security services, there was no publication of the security advice from the agency or the Home Office. Yet the agency was aware its advisory document would become public once it was sent electronically out to Westminster. Republishing it in the press assists the general population more easily recognize interactions with a deceptive intent.
The alert has the impact of flushing out additional details from within Westminster, although that is not the agency's main objective. The agency wants people in public life to recognize that simply because interactions on LinkedIn are not as toxic as on X or Facebook, it does not mean they are completely safe.
Nor is internal security service understood to have been reacting to any specific incident in parliament, though the recent actions occur after the awkward collapse of the legal case of a ex-assistant an individual and his friend another person on a technicality earlier in the autumn.
Both individuals had been charged of spying for the foreign power – a allegation they rejected – but inability to successfully conclude a prosecution under the now repealed previous legislation resulted in warnings that British democracy had been insufficiently defended.
Updated Laws and Beijing's Long-Term Interests
The law has now been changed, and the security briefing contains a reminder of its successor: “Those engaging in espionage activity risk substantial criminal penalties under the National Security Act.” It is a criminal offense if a person participates in behavior that is or is likely to “significantly help a foreign intelligence service”.
A natural question, though, is what China has to achieve. A politician who is not a government minister will have restricted knowledge of sensitive information, and an associate of theirs less so. Yet Beijing is also interested in the legislative body: for a time, in 2020 and 2021, the Britain's China policy on issues such as Huawei or the Uyghur repression or alleged atrocities was being influenced by MPs.
Cultural Differences and Persistent Digital Risks
In part there are cultural differences as well. Authoritarian governments like Beijing's export intelligence collection techniques and the scale of its spy network is vast, engaging three hundred thousand individuals. A former US official, a US national cyber director under the US administration, said it was sometimes estimated that “the Chinese have more English speakers engaged in this than we [western intelligence] have personnel with language skills”.
Beijing is willing to develop contacts over the long term and sometimes even the intelligence services have struggled to distinguish between legitimate relationships and espionage. “Beijing has a minimal requirement for what information is deemed to be useful,” security minister Dan Jarvis informed parliamentarians on Wednesday, but a sudden turn in the political cycle may mean an individual quickly peripheral turning important.
An alternative perspective to think about the relentless efforts at secret information gathering is in the broader framework of the international competition between China and the west at a level below the level of direct conflict. China has stepped up its cyber operations, with the Salt Typhoon penetration of communications systems in 80 countries, and the Volt Typhoon compromise of countless connected equipment.
Chinese authorities is engaged in persistent attempts to find covert sources on British democracy online because it wants to be challenging, to demonstrate power and because it can.
