Chinese spies are "grooming" people for influence and to steal secrets
The Chinese authorities playing the long game in cultivating contacts to manipulate opinion in China’s favor.
Chinese spies are "grooming" people for influence and to steal secrets. Now we know the answer to why there are so many fake profiles on social media, and what they want to accomplish. Their goal is to recruit 'agents' to be their useful idiots. I suspect we have a lot of agents in our country working on their behalf, as do the British.
Professor Anthony Glees, from the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, told The Sun Online what the UK knows about it just the "tip of the iceberg" for Chinese espionage.
It is believed they often use social media - such as LinkedIn and Facebook - to connect with their prey as they lure them in. They will then bed the target, and use their influence over them to try and extort valuable information for the Communist Party. Chinese operatives however are said to not just be looking for high profile politicians, but aides, staffers and interns could also be at risk.
"We must assume the Chinese are doing the same thing here, using cash and sex to get agents into areas of interest to them," he said.
A few highlights from the Washington Times article:
Britain’s domestic intelligence chief is warning that Chinese intelligence agents are grooming British citizens as spies as part of influence operations that can stretch over years and even decades.
Ken McCallum, director general of the intelligence service known as MI5, said recently in his annual update on threats to Britain that Chinese intelligence operations pose one of the major threats to national and economic security, including to the political system.
“We see the Chinese authorities playing the long game in cultivating contacts to manipulate opinion in China’s favor — seeking to co-opt and influence not just prominent parliamentarians from across the political landscape, but people much earlier in their careers in public life, gradually building a debt of obligation,” Mr. McCallum said.
“We’re seeing an increasingly assertive Chinese Communist Party using overt and covert pressure to bend other countries to its will,” he said. The West is facing “a contest in which our security, values and democratic institutions are at stake.”
Chinese technology and information theft operations target intelligence officers, cyberhackers, business executives and academic researchers with access to government and private-sector secrets, he said.
“The Chinese authorities present a different order of challenge,” he said. “They’re trying to rewrite the rulebook, to buy the league, to recruit our coaching staff to work for them.”
A useful and relevant definition:
In political jargon, a useful idiot is a term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause -- particularly a bad cause originating from a devious, ruthless source -- without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation. Source: Wikipedia