The director of MI5 has claimed that Chinese spies used online channels to try to contact more than 20,000 people in the UK, according to The Independent.
Ken McCallum made this statement to the BBC at a speech on Tuesday with his colleagues in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance. He stated:
“We have seen a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale.”
The head of British intelligence was speaking at an FBI event in California. Intelligence chiefs from the United States, New Zealand, Australia and Canada joined him. At the press conference, McCallum said that the military conflict in the Gaza Strip could be the cause of terrorist attacks in the UK. He said:
“There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat and/or changes in shape in terms of what is being targeted, in terms of how people are taking inspiration.Terrorists can draw inspiration not just from things they see happening inside the UK but things they see happening in the Middle East or on the continent or elsewhere. So we would be silly not to be paying very close attention, and we are.”
However, the threat of espionage from China remained at the forefront of some panelists’ minds, as FBI Director Chris Wray stated:
“China has made economic espionage and stealing others’ work and ideas a central component of its national strategy and that espionage is at the expense of innovators in all five of our countries. That threat has only gotten more dangerous and more insidious in recent years.”
The heads of Britain’s intelligence services are quite rare to speak in public. However, MI5 is undertaking a huge range of measures to alert tens of thousands of potentially vulnerable British companies, requiring a level of public disclosure that the security service has not previously undertaken. Mr McCallum said:
“The UK is seeing a sharp rise in aggressive attempts by other states to steal competitive advantage. It’s the same across all five of our countries. The stakes are now incredibly high on emerging technologies; states, which lead the way in areas like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and synthetic biology, will have the power to shape all our futures. If you’re working today at the cutting edge of technology then geopolitics is interested in you, even if you’re not interested in geopolitics.”
Mr McCallum told the BBC:
“These technologies are at a historic moment where they are beginning to change our world in some pretty fundamental ways,” “And we know that authoritarian states are laser-focused on the opportunities that these technologies may present for them.”
The head of MI5 has warned British researchers that they are key targets for hostile actors who steal the results of British research with “depressing regularity”. He said:
“If your field of research is relevant to advanced materials or quantum computing or AI or biotech, to name but a few, your work will be of interest to people employed by states who do not share our values.”
