The government is holding talks with LinkedIn on how it can clamp down on prolific Chinese espionage activity after a rare interference alert was issued by MI5.
The National Protective Security Authority, which is part of the UK’s security services, is speaking to social media platforms about making them less attractive for foreign agents, a government official told the Guardian.
MPs and peers were told on Tuesday that they faced “a covert and calculated” attempt at espionage via two LinkedIn profiles linked to the Chinese intelligence service. MI5 said the two accounts, posing as recruiters, were trying to obtain “insider insights” into British politics.
The spy agency said the profiles under the names of Amanda Qiu, from BP-YR Executive Search, and Shirly Shen, from InternshipUnion, were using LinkedIn to “conduct outreach at scale”. Both accounts have since been deleted.
A LinkedIn spokesperson said: “Creating a fake account or misrepresenting your identity is a clear violation of our terms of service. We remain focused on detecting state-sponsored abuse and will continue to enforce our policies against fake accounts.”
The LinkedIn pages of Shirly Shen and Amanda Qiu. Composite: Linkedin
The Commons speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, has invited MPs to a cybersecurity and resilience briefing with the GCHQ director, Anne Keast-Butler, and the chief executive of the National Cyber Security Centre, Richard Horne, next week.
In its espionage alert, MI5 said operatives sometimes preferred to move conversations to encrypted platforms, and those targeted included thinktank employees and geopolitical consultants.
Bryn Harris, the chief legal counsel at the Free Speech Union, told the Guardian he received three approaches this year over email from individuals purporting to be interested in his work on academic freedom.
The messages began a few months after one of the FSU’s members, the University College London professor Michelle Shipworth, was involved in a high-profile row on the subject. Shipworth said she had been banned from teaching a “provocative” course involving China to protect the university’s commercial interests, triggering an investigation into her allegations by UCL.
Harris was contacted by a Gmail account under the name of Lala Chen in June, another belonging to Ailin Chen in July, and a third under the name of Emily Emily in October. A private threat assessment concluded the senders were in the Asia-Pacific region despite purporting to be based in the US.
In an email on 22 June, Lala Chen said she was interested in the FSU’s views on “the balance between academic freedom and campus management power in the current higher education environment”.
On 10 July, Ailin Chen claimed to work for an IBM research centre and praised the FSU’s “invaluable” written submission to the higher education bill. Both suggested moving the conversation to WhatsApp.
In an email on 13 October, Emily Emily said she worked for Google’s AI division and complimented Harris’s research papers. “We hope to establish a long-term partnership with you, with you serving as a full-time technical advisor. We will then sign a formal contract,” she wrote.
Harris said the personalised nature of the emails convinced him they were “more than a random phishing attack”. He has reported them via the MI5’s online risk logging portal and worked on an assessment with UK-China Transparency, a charity that conducts research on UK-China relations.
In issuing its alert, it is understood MI5 was not responding to a single incident involving Qui or Shen, but the volume of their recruitment efforts was such that they felt a rare semi-public warning was necessary.
The goal was to give people “information they need to identify risk” in the hope that politicians and those working with them would reflect on their online activity.
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No timeframe has been given for Qui or Shen’s activities, which also covered other European countries, though MI5 warned that people cooperating with them could be at risk of prosecution under the National Security Act.
“This sort of thing is endemic on LinkedIn – something crossed my desk every week relating to activity there,” one source familiar with the matter said.
“There are tens of thousands of suspicious incidents. Approaches to parliamentarians will make up a relatively small proportion. It’s a lot of covert approaches to academics by the Chinese state, as well as companies who have some sort of stake in national security, whether that’s IP or UK infrastructure.”
The government’s approach to China has come under scrutiny over security concerns after the collapse of a high-profile trial involving two men, including a former parliamentary researcher, who were accused of spying for China. Both deny any wrongdoing.
Before prosecutors decided to drop the charges in mid-September, a meeting was held in Whitehall to discuss the implications that the trial would have on the UK-China relationship. Ministers have stressed this did not discuss the government’s evidence in the trial, and was held on the assumption that it was going ahead as planned.
Among those present were the national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, the cabinet secretary, Chris Wormald, the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, and several senior Foreign Office officials including Dan Chugg, the director for north-east Asia and China.
The Guardian can disclose that Chugg is leaving his role in the coming months having taken voluntary redundancy. It is understood that he did not want to sign up for the required three more years, having done the job for four-and-a-half years. The Foreign Office is restructuring and reducing its headcount.
A government spokesperson said: “It is longstanding policy not to comment on individual staffing cases.”
