MPs and members of the House of Lords have been warned by MI5 that they face a significant risk of espionage from the Chinese state.<\/p>\n
Commons Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle and his counterpart in the House of Lords, Lord McFall, have circulated a new “espionage alert” issued by the security services.<\/p>\n
Writing to MPs, Sir Lindsay said Chinese state actors were “relentless” in trying to “interfere with our processes and influence activity at Parliament”.<\/p>\n
He said the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) was “actively reaching out to individuals in our community”, and that they wanted to “collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf”.<\/p>\n
The alert from MI5 says “false personas” approach targets to “work as freelance consultants authoring geopolitical reports”.<\/p>\n
It specifically identifies two LinkedIn profiles which it says are used on behalf of the MSS.<\/p>\n
The alert says they act as “civilian recruitment head-hunters”, recruiting individuals working in British politics for the MSS, and solicit “non-public and insider insights”.<\/p>\n
Other elements of espionage described in the MI5 alert include all-expenses paid trips to China, and payment for information through cash or cryptocurrency.<\/p>\n
Targets are said to include “Parliament staff, economists, think tank employees, geo-political consultants and those working alongside [the government] including MPs and members of the House of Lords”.<\/p>\n
Security Minister Dan Jarvis will address the House of Commons shortly on measures the government is taking to combat Chinese espionage.<\/p>\n
Former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said the alert showed China was taking an “aggressive position” that “blows a hole through all of that ridiculous nonsense” about whether or not China was a threat to UK national security.<\/p>\n
“We have to be much, much more vigilant,” he told BBC News.<\/p>\n
“Why is the government so unable to call China what it is, which is a persistent, continuing threat to Britain’s national security.<\/p>\n
“That is clear to every single member of the public\u2026 but somehow the government seems to think it isn’t that clear.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MPs and members of the House of Lords have been warned by MI5 that they face a significant…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269681,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-269680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269680\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}