🎯 BBC [excerpt]: A former Western #spy says he once improbably told a Chinese counterpart that China did the "wrong type" of #spying. What he meant was that Western states prefer to focus on gathering the kind of intelligence that helps them understand their adversaries. But Chinese spies have different priorities.
Protecting the position of the Communist Party is central. "Regime stability is their number one goal," Roman Rozhavsky, an FBI counterintelligence official, explains.
That requires delivering economic growth. And so China’s spies see acquiring Western #technology as a top national security requirement. Western spies say their Beijing counterparts share information they have gathered with Chinese state-run companies, in a way that the West’s intelligence agencies do not with their own domestic firms.
'Special treatment'
"My agency is busier than we've ever been in our 74 years of history," Mike Burgess, the plain-speaking head of the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (Asio) explained to me.
"I rarely call out countries because when it comes to straight espionage, we do it to them," Burgess told me. "Commercial #espionage is a completely different matter, and that's why China is getting special treatment on this one."
He acknowledged that the Western allies had been slow to understand this threat. "I think it's been going on for a long time and collectively we've missed it," he admits.
We were sitting down last October in California, where he was taking part in the first ever public appearance by the security chiefs of the so-called Five Eyes – the intelligence-sharing alliance made up of the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
The unprecedented gathering was a very deliberate attempt to turn up the volume of warnings about China because of the fear that many companies and organisations were still not listening. The location in Silicon Valley was also carefully chosen - a spotlight on China’s attempts to steal technology, sometimes through cyber-espionage and sometimes through recruiting insiders.
China's resources for this are on a different scale. A Western intelligence official estimates China has around 600,000 people working on intelligence and security, more than any other state in the world.
Western security services simply cannot investigate every case. According to British intelligence agency MI5, more than 20,000 people in the #UK alone have been approached over professional networking sites like #LinkedIn by Chinese spies to cultivate a relationship.
"People can be unwitting that they are in fact corresponding with an intelligence officer from another nation - but eventually they find themselves passing information that rips out the future of their own company," the head of MI5, Ken McCallum told me at the California gathering.
#news #geopolitics
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