United Kingdom

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Officials were conducting about 160 investigations into security threats linked to enemy states, the vast majority of which concerned suspected proxies in the UK, said [Commander Dominic Murphy, head of the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism squad and in charge nationally]. In some cases Britons had been unknowingly recruited to feed information to foreign governments.

“We’ve seen a significant increase,” said Murphy. “Every single week we’re working on proxy-based investigations. It does form the majority of what we’re doing.

“The breadth of activity is so significant. It goes from very low-level information acquisitions, and that can be cyberattacks, or it can be trying to turn somebody inside an organisation … right through to an assassination plot in the United Kingdom.

“There are disruptions happening on an extraordinarily regular basis. Almost every month we’re disrupting something — and often much more regularly than that even.”

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In recent years several Britons have been charged with espionage. They include Dylan Earl, 21, from Leicestershire, who was recruited by the Wagner Group, a mercenary organisation with ties to the Kremlin, and instructed to carry out arson on a London warehouse storing aid for Ukraine.

This act has empowered security officials but the risk posed by foreign states and their proxies is only going to increase in the years ahead, Murphy predicts, as a result of political instability in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine and the mass expulsion of foreign intelligence officers from Britain following the Salisbury nerve agent poisoning — a failed assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military officer and double agent for British intelligence and his daughter, Yulia.

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His intervention also comes amid heightened anxieties in Westminster over the extent and reach of Chinese spy operations in Britain. In November, MI5 warned that various parliamentarians had been targeted on LinkedIn by Chinese agents posing as headhunters.

Before that, two British men were charged with passing sensitive political information to a Chinese intelligence agent. The case was later dropped by prosecutors. They denied the charges.

Critics have meanwhile warned that Beijing’s efforts to construct a new super-embassy in London will, if approved, embolden Chinese espionage and interference in the UK.

Murphy said China was one of “the big three” for conducting proxy operations in the UK, alongside Russia and Iran.

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He also expressed concern that the algorithms used by social media were fuelling the ease with which Britons and foreign intelligence agents were connecting with one another.

“If someone is trying to understand how they can earn some money and do stuff on behalf of other countries, I’d hate for there to be a situation where the internet service providers or social media companies were pushing content towards those people,” he said.

Not all of those recruited as proxies are aware of their involvement in espionage. Murphy said they had uncovered cases in which private detectives had entered into business with companies linked to foreign states and were tasked with collecting information.

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Thousands of new mothers feel unsafe, unsupported and overwhelmed, according to the National Childbirth Trust

Exclusive: Letter signed by figures on right and left of party says UK should follow Australia’s example by enacting ban

First they came for adults site and social media; now they are already discussing about putting vpns and app stores behind age verification.

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Many observers of Britain’s technology scene rue losing DeepMind to Google in 2014. Its capable founders had ambitious plans and could not find anyone in Britain who had the vision and cash to help them make them happen. They sold for £400 million when a cheque from the government or a smart domestic investor could have seen DeepMind become Britain’s OpenAI — the latter, set up in 2015, was valued at $500 billion last year.

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“If you’re lucky enough to be a country that starts to see something emerge that could be [trillion dollar in] scale, it feels fairly obvious to me that you need to do something about it,” [AI expert and venture capitalist Ian] Hogarth says. “It still to me feels tragic that nobody in the UK really realised how important DeepMind was.”

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While DeepMind’s cofounders Sir Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg are exceptional, others are following in their path, inspired by what the pair have achieved. In response the government should get behind them, Hogarth says. It can do that in a number of powerful ways, just as the Americans and Chinese already do.

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“The primary driver of economic growth in the UK was the City and finance. That has been superseded by technology, globally,” he says.

“Fundamentally what the UK needs is a government that has an understanding of technology embedded in every aspect of what it does. It’s not a bolt-on advisory council but actually a mindset that this is something we have to win.

“You want the prime minister to be waking up thinking about who are the five companies that could really, really matter. This is actually the meat and potatoes of the next 20 years of the UK’s success or failure.”

Where possible, government spending should be directed at this small group of “winners” to help create $100 billion-plus national tech champions, he argues. Giving lucrative computer contracts to Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and the like, or drone contracts to US defence companies, actively hinders the development of their UK-based rivals.

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Britain is examining plans to use any oil seized from Russian shadow fleet vessels to fund the Ukrainian war effort, a government source has disclosed.

Under options being discussed, the UK would not only stop funds flowing to Russia’s war machine but also divert money raised from sanctioned oil to Ukraine. Whether such a plan is feasible is unclear.

“There would be a double impact on Russia’s war machine — we wouldn’t just be depriving them of illicit war revenues but also finding a way to help fund Ukraine’s resistance,” the source said.

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Elite troops trained to rappel onto ships from helicopters and capture their crews could target hundreds of illegal oil tankers after the government identified a legal basis for such raids.

Two shadow fleet vessels sanctioned by Britain — Spring Fortune and Range Vale — are on course to sail into the Channel at about lunchtime on Wednesday.

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