The United Kingdom has seen a 35% rise in the last year in the number of suspects investigated annually for possibly working for a hostile foreign government, the head of the UK’s domestic security service, MI5, said in a speech Thursday.
In the service’s annual update on threats facing the UK, Ken McCallum said, “A more hostile world is forcing the biggest shifts in MI5’s mission since 9/11,” and that his “teams are currently running near-record volumes of investigations.”
Opening his speech, McCallum expressed sympathies for the two people killed in an ISIS-linked attack on a synagogue in Manchester earlier this month. The head of the secretive agency added that the “aggregate scale of the terrorist threat is huge,” and the combination of rising threats from state actors as well as from a mix of terrorists with “Islamist, extreme right wing or other ideologies” – who might be well-prepared, teenage or mentally disturbed – heralded a “new era.”
The UK has seen a variety of espionage and sabotage incidents in recent years, from Chinese influence operations targeting the parliament to Russian-directed arson against warehouses supplying Ukraine’s forces. McCallum also said there had been “more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots” in the past year.
“State threats are increasing. … In the last year, we’ve seen a 35% increase in the number of individuals we’re investigating for involvement in state threat activity,” he said, adding that these individuals were present in the UK rather than directing operations from overseas.
“The state threat activity I’m describing is overwhelmingly dominated by the triumvirate of Russian, Chinese and Iranian state actors,” McCallum continued.
Asked to describe the nature of the Russian threat, he said: “In terms of its lethality, the activities are spread. This ranges from, in some cases, arson, in some cases attempted sabotage. In some cases, pretty detailed attempts to gather specific targeting information about individuals. … the only obvious purpose of which would be to make it feasible for someone then to do something nasty, potentially lethal, towards those individuals.”
In May, Orlin Roussev, 47, was sentenced in a London court to nearly 11 years in jail for leading a British-based Russian spy ring, which prosecutors said carried out surveillance for the Kremlin. Five other members of the ring were jailed for a total of about 40 years, all accused of gathering detailed information on journalists, dissidents and Ukrainian soldiers being trained at a US military base in Germany. Prosecutors said the six, all Bulgarian nationals, were financially motivated and did not report directly to Russian intelligence.
In his speech, McCallum alluded twice to “proxies” for Russia perhaps not receiving payment for their work from their handlers, yet declined to provide specifics. “I am able legally to say, I don’t think it’s a good career move to work for the Russian Intelligence Services in the United Kingdom,” he said.
McCallum also warned of the role artificial intelligence can play in future and present threats, saying, “Would-be terrorists already try to harness AI for their propaganda, their weapons research, their target reconnaissance.” Yet he cautioned against “hype and scaremongering” and said that he believed AI as a whole brought “real benefits” in threat detection.
“I am not forecasting Hollywood movie scenarios,” he added. “Artificial intelligence may never ‘mean’ us harm. But it would be reckless to ignore the potential for it to cause harm.”
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