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In Depth

Nation States' Espionage and Counterespionage

An overview of the 2007 Global Economic Espionage Landscape

By Christopher Burgess

Page 7

Doubtful the UK's alarm bells regarding Russia are solely due to the continued dust-up over the Alexander Litvinenko poisoning and the refusal by Russia to extradite Andrei Lugovoi, the key suspect in the murder. That would seem to have been settled by the July 2007 expulsion of four members of the Russian diplomatic mission to the UK, all of whom were believed to be associated with the SVR. Rather, the aforementioned pronouncement of interest in economic espionage on the part of the SVR has garnered the full attention of the limited resources of the British special services.

Lest we think only Russia is interested in the UK, we must also note the activities of the Chinese, which reached a level that warranted multiple advisories and warnings from the UK government about the threat to the nation's infrastructure, as well as the nation's economy.

According to an early September 2007 article in the Times, a Whitehall source (a UK government employee) noted how China was moving from "old-fashioned espionage" to electronic hacking. The source said, "China is engaged in hostile intelligence activities, and instead of using the old-fashioned methods [recruiting agents and stealing blueprints], they are focusing on electronic means to hack into systems to discover Britain's defence and foreign policy secrets, and they are technologically pretty advanced and adept at it."

The same article notes that the UK's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI)—an organization created in February 2007—has warned Whitehall about the threats posed by the ubiquitous wireless networks, with the observation, "A key implication of this unprecedented wireless connectivity is that attackers can reach you at all times."

Moving to early November 2005, Jonathan Evans, director general of the British Security Service (MI5), announced to the public his need to continue to expend resources to stave off the "unreconstructed attempts by Russia, China and others to spy on us." To provide some context, Evans noted his disappointment that at this time—when the UK and the international community is facing the threat of international terrorism, Al-Qaida being the most extreme—MI5 must continue to expend its limited counterintelligence and counterespionage resources against countries that "devote considerable time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and economic intelligence at our expense." Evans cautioned how the mechanism used are not limited to traditional methodologies but also involve the deployment of "sophisticated technical attacks, using the Internet to penetrate computer networks."