Comment
MICHAEL CLARKE
We must grab back control of Brits’ data from China – our national security depends on it
It’s not too late to grab back the initiative from the Chinese
CHINA has created a new form of espionage.
They still do the traditional stuff with spies and secret operations — but their best agents are now in cyberspace.
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The British Government has revealed that 40million of our voters had their details hacked by China through the Electoral Commission.
They harvested names and addresses from the electoral roll.
What will they do with them? They’ll keep them and cross-check them.
In the old days, you’d imagine people sitting in offices with reams of paper.
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Well, it’s not like that now.
They just apply AI to them. And with that you can find needles in haystacks.
The Chinese passed a law that every one of their nationals and businesses must work for their intelligence agencies if required to do so.
That law — Article Seven of China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law — is quite astonishing.
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It also applies to any Chinese citizens or businesses abroad.
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And they’re not allowed to say they’ve been required to give everything. They must keep it secret.
Chinese company Huawei — which was eventually barred from Britain’s 5G network owing to fears it would steal customer data — said it never has, and never would, give any material to Chinese intelligence agencies.
The first statement might be true — maybe it hasn’t given over any information — but it can’t possibly say it would never do that, because tomorrow it might be required by law to do it and keep quiet about it afterwards.
This law means that every Chinese electric vehicle is potentially an intelligence collection agency.
An electric vehicle is basically a computer on wheels and US firm Tesla’s cars are banned from many areas of China.
The Chinese won’t let them in because they know what they can do.
Tesla vehicles do sell in China but you are not allowed to take them into all sorts of areas that the Chinese think have national security implications.
And if they are worried about Tesla then we should be worried about their electric cars.
Every Chinese amateur drone is already a collection agency.
So hobbyist drone users — people who like flying quadcopters over their neighbours’ gardens or pools — are subject to this.
These drones have regular software updates and every time that happens, the information on your existing software could go straight back to Shanghai.
People will ask themselves why on earth the Chinese are collecting such information on an industrial scale.
Why do they want pictures of everyone’s swimming pools or whatever?
Surely they have gathered so much information that they couldn’t possibly analyse it?
Just a decade ago that would have been a sensible question.
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But now there’s a very clear answer — AI.
With artificial intelligence, they can reconstruct out of this huge amount of data a complete vision of how our societies work.
Some believe TikTok — owned by a Chinese company — has the potential to be a 24/7 intelligence tool. It certainly harvests vast amounts of data.
The US may now ban the app, with politicians saying they are concerned about the “national security threat” from TikTok.
TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew says it has committed to making sure users’ data is “free from outside manipulation”.
There’s so much Chinese technology in our societies.
The only safe assumption to make is that all of it is potentially sending material back to China — and Britain and the West have reacted slowly to this.
We’ll never go back to the cosy security and intelligence games of the Cold War
It will take us a generation to stop using Far East technology and switch to other sources.
Everyone went for Chinese tech because it was cheap and it worked, which is why it’s in so many domestic goods.
We’ve started to make that switch with telecoms. The decision to bar Huawei was absolutely the right one.
It will take us a generation of signif-icant work to replace Chinese companies whose technology is already in place. And that new tech will be more expensive.
But we have to put national security ahead of cost. That’s the trade-off.
So we have to stand up to China.
The Western liberal economies have got to be united on this, otherwise they will get played off against each other.
Mess up China’s systems
We have to tell particular Chinese companies that we will not let them sell to particular areas of our economies.
Then the Chinese will begin to get the message that it’s bad for their economy if nobody trusts them.
We have to look at the so-called crown jewels of our societies — national infrastructures, our defence systems, economic systems and governmental systems — and protect them.
We’ve got to keep Chinese technology well away from them. You’ve got to protect the really important bits of our societies, then you can live with a degree of risk in the other parts.
And then there’s the option of retaliation.
Britain and America are believed to be pretty good at offensive cyber warfare.
We have the ability to mess up China’s systems as well.
As far as I know, we haven’t used it. But the fact is, we could.
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We’ll never go back to the cosy security and intelligence games of the Cold War where most people weren’t affected by spying.
But it’s not too late to grab back the initiative from the Chinese — our national security depends on it.
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