China's Been Hacking British Government Phones for Years – HotAir

Shoot. Looks like Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, doesn’t have to actually be a Chinese operative. 

He just has to use a government phone, as the Chinese have been hacking them for years, according to a new report from the Telegraph.

SCHWEET, no?

The US tipped the Brits off to the vast, worldwide network.

No worries on Sir Keir’s part. He’s off to cozy up to Xi Jinping Pooh, just like his Canadian counterpart did a couple of weeks ago.

…The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing.

State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the closest aides to Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak between 2021 and 2024.

It is unclear whether the hack included the mobile phones of the prime ministers themselves, but one source with knowledge of the breach said it went “right into the heart of Downing Street”.

Intelligence sources in the US indicated that the Chinese espionage operation, known as Salt Typhoon, was ongoing, raising the possibility that Sir Keir Starmer and his senior staff may also have been exposed. MI5 issued an “espionage alert” to Parliament in November about the threat of spying from the Chinese state.

Sir Keir departs for China this week – the first visit by a British prime minister since Baroness May in 2018 – to secure trade and investment ties with Beijing.

And Sir Keir is the man with a plan. Once he jammed through the ‘right, right, old chap‘ for that mega Chinese embassy in the heart of London, and immediately prior to leaving for Beijing, Starmer is rumored to have popped over to ASDA for a couple of burner phones so he could be just like Michael Westen in Burn Notice.

Naturally, the British government isn’t keen on admitting they had Chinese bugs in their communications, and Starmer’s not about to let this unfortunate revelation put a crimp in his party.

But for all the seeming insouciance towards Chinese surveillance trangressions out of official Downing Street, the rest of the intelligence community is horrified at what might have been compromised and what they still don’t know is in situ.

As in, it could be pretty bad, yo, with a Labour government that is basically disengaged, according to Parliament’s own Intelligence and Security Committee assessment.

…Mr Wollman, now president of cybersecurity platform CyberProof, said: “While much of the public reporting has focused on US targets, Salt Typhoon’s operations have extended into Europe, the Middle East and Africa, where it has targeted telecoms firms, government entities and technology companies.”

He added that the operations were “highly targeted, with confirmed breaches across multiple regions, including UK critical infrastructure in 2023 and 2024”.

The strategic espionage campaign collected “communications routing and geolocation metadata from government and defence systems”, he said.

Last month, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee found that the “Government has no strategy on China, let alone an effective one”, and was “singularly failing to deploy a ‘whole-of-state’ approach” in responding to the threat.

The Government declined to comment.

US intelligence says Salt Typhoon is an ongoing operation, so Chinese operatives could be listening in on whoever they have gained access to right now.

That’s all well and good, but a really unpopular guy has a date for Chinese food he doesn’t want to miss.

…Sir Keir departs for China this week – the first visit by a British prime minister since Baroness May in 2018 – to secure trade and investment ties with Beijing.

His trip follows the Government’s decision to approve plans for a Chinese mega-embassy in London, which The Telegraph revealed would be located alongside some of the City’s most sensitive communications cables.

And, by God, he’s going.

He doesn’t care who hears about it.

Even when he gets there, no one listens to what he has to say anyway.

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