Ken McCallum says MI5 was already watching a large cohort of people with extremist mindsets, often acting alone, moving towards violence in new ways…reports Asian Lite News
MI5 is monitoring for increased risks to the UK as the Israel-Gaza war continues. “One of the things that concerns me most right now, is to understand quite what the shape of the UK impact will be,” Ken McCallum said in an interview to BBC.
He also warned there was a risk that events in the Middle East could radicalise people towards violence. He was speaking at an unprecedented public appearance of security chiefs of the Five Eyes alliance in California.
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The heads of US, UK, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand security agencies were appearing together for the first time to warn of technological innovation being stolen by China. In an interview, McCallum said “the scale and monstrous nature” of the Hamas attack on Israel had come as a “shock”.
Discussing the possibility of the Israel-Gaza conflict radicalising people in the UK towards violence, he said: “That is certainly a risk. It has always been the case that lots of would-be-terrorists in the UK draw inspiration through their distorted understanding of what is happening in other countries.”
He said he could not comment on specific intelligence relating to any threats the Security Service is currently seeing. But he said that MI5 was already watching a “pretty large cohort” of people with extremist mindsets and that one of the most challenging parts of its work was trying to detect when these people, often acting alone, suddenly moved towards violence in new or unpredictable ways.
In recent years, MI5 has seen a shift toward lone-actors inspired by events but not formally part of any organisation or group. They can be harder to spot and to work out when they are about to act, McCallum said. US officials say they have already seen a rise in reported threats in the wake of events in the Middle East.
“We cannot and do not discount the possibility that Hamas or other foreign terrorist organisations could exploit the conflict to call on their supporters to conduct attacks on our own soil,” FBI Director Chris Wray, told reporters.
“We are also particularly alert to the potential these events have to inspire violence against Jewish Americans or Muslim Americans, institutions and houses of worship.” A six-year-old Muslim boy was stabbed to death in Illinois on Saturday in what has been described as a hate crime.
Stanford University in California was chosen as the venue for this unprecedented first public meeting of the Five Eyes because it lies in the heart of Silicon Valley and the security chiefs are issuing a public warning about China stealing innovation.
But in private meetings together, the Middle East will be high on the agenda. “As you’d expect, we will also use our time together to discuss a range of other issues in private, including what Hamas’s attack means both in the region and in our homelands,” McCallum said.
The MI5 head said that one of the most difficult aspects of the role was to balance resources against different types of threats which were equally concerning. “How do you balance the ability to track a teenage would-be terrorist consuming extreme right-wing and hateful material in his bedroom and potentially considering buying a bladed weapon with the longer term risks posed by fast or precious cutting edge research from one of our universities? They both matter to our national security.”
‘Epic scale’ of Chinese espionage
More than 20,000 people in the UK have now been approached covertly online by Chinese spies, the head of MI5 said. It comes amid a new warning to tens of thousands of British businesses of the risk of having their innovation stolen.
“We have seen a sustained campaign on a pretty epic scale,” McCallum said. In the past, MI5 focused on protecting government secrets from foreign spies but now the fear is that innovation is often stolen from small companies, start-ups and researchers who may not previously have worried about security.
“If you’re working today at the cutting edge of technology then geopolitics is interested in you, even if you’re not interested in geopolitics,” McCallum said.
MI5 is trying to warn tens of thousands of UK companies who are potentially at risk, and doing so requires the security service to go public in a way it has not done before.
McCallum said that MI5 had now seen suspected Chinese agents approach over 20,000 people in the UK over professional networking sites like LinkedIn, in order to try to cultivate them to provide sensitive information, double the previously reported figure.
In the last year, MI5 has also seen more than 20 instances of Chinese companies considering or actively trying to gain access to sensitive technology developed by UK companies and universities through investments or other means where the full role of China is hidden, often through complicated company structures.
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