🔗 Share this article

A surprising connection on LinkedIn. A proposal of employment from a recruiter, most likely a young woman, operating from China. The opportunity to earn around £20,000 part-time preparing a small number of geopolitical reports for a firm from China containing “non-public” or “insider” insights. Compensation in cryptocurrency or cash preferred.

It may seem obvious, on this telling, that something about this approach would be amiss. Nevertheless, China’s influential intelligence agency continues to view it valuable to use recruitment consultants to try it – leading the domestic spy agency to warn repeatedly about their operations online.

Large-Scale Contact Attempts on Professional Networks

In 2023, the head of MI5 Ken McCallum said operatives from China were approaching Britons on LinkedIn on an unprecedented scale, at a frequency of 10,000 over the preceding two and a half years, attempting to obtain governmental, commercial, defense and scientific secrets. However a new campaign targeting politicians and Westminster has led the spy agency to take further action.

An espionage alert was issued on Tuesday via the administrative teams of the Commons speaker and his Lords counterpart: a brief presentation after the repeated efforts of certain individuals and other operatives to reach out to Members of Parliament, lords, their assistants, economists, research organizations – anybody who might become a source.

Intelligence Approach and Legal Changes

In the curious style of UK security services, there was no publication of the security advice from MI5 or the Home Office. Yet the agency knew its briefing note would leak once it was emailed out to Westminster. Republishing it in the media helps the wider public better identify communications with a fraudulent purpose.

This warning has the effect of uncovering additional details from in and around Westminster, though that is not MI5’s primary purpose. The service wants public figures to understand that just because interactions on professional networks are not as toxic as on X or Facebook, it does not mean they are without risk.

Additionally, the internal security service understood to have been responding to a particular event in parliament, although the burst of activity occur after the embarrassing failure of the legal case of a former parliamentary aide Christopher Cash and his associate Christopher Berry on a technicality in recent months.

Both individuals had been charged of spying for the foreign power – a allegation they denied – but failure to successfully conclude a prosecution under the now repealed Official Secrets Act led to warnings that British democracy had been insufficiently defended.

Revised Legislation and Beijing's Strategic Interests

The law has since been updated, and the security briefing includes a reminder of its successor: “Those engaging in spying operations face substantial legal consequences under the National Security Act.” It is a criminal offense if a person participates in conduct that could potentially “materially assist a foreign intelligence service”.

An obvious inquiry, though, is what Beijing has to achieve. A politician who is outside ministerial roles will have restricted access of sensitive information, and an associate of theirs even less. Yet the Chinese government is particularly focused in parliament: for a period, in recent years, the UK’s approach to China on matters such as Huawei or the human rights situation or genocide was being influenced by MPs.

Cultural Differences and Persistent Digital Risks

To a degree there are cultural differences too. Autocratic regimes like Beijing's export information gathering methods and the scale of its spy network is enormous, employing three hundred thousand people. A former US official, a US national cyber director under president Joe Biden, said it was occasionally assessed that “the Chinese have greater linguistic capacity engaged in this than Western agencies have English speakers”.

The Chinese government is prepared to develop contacts over the long term and sometimes even the agencies have found it difficult to differentiate legitimate relationships and spying. “Beijing has a low threshold for which details is deemed to be useful,” the minister responsible Dan Jarvis told parliamentarians on this week, but a rapid shift in the government situation may mean someone quickly peripheral becomes significant.

An alternative perspective to consider the relentless efforts at covert intelligence collection is in the broader framework of the geopolitical contest between China and the Western nations at a level below the level of outright war. The nation has increased its hacking efforts, with the one campaign penetration of phone and data networks in 80 countries, and the another operation breach of countless connected equipment.

Chinese authorities is engaged in persistent attempts to find secret informants on UK politics via digital means because it wants to be provocative, to demonstrate power and because it can.