4 2GM Thursday October 15 2020 | the times
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tution and affect the national security
and prosperity of the UK.”
Sir Peter Gregson, vice-chancellor of
Cranfield University and author of the
guidelines, told The Times that the
benefits of international academic
collaboration came with growing risks.
“All of us need to put this on our
agendas and accountability has to rest
with vice-chancellors,” he said. “No
university can afford to be complacent.”
The guidance is “country agnostic” to
prevent it from becoming outdated.
“It’s a changing scene. The vast major-
ity of international collaborations are
very robust and have extremely benefi-cial effects but in some cases these have
opened up risks that have not been
appropriately managed,” he said.
Some Hong Kong students at
Oxford, Sheffield, Warwick, Lough-
borough and Nottingham universities
told The Times that the guidance “only
addressed the symptom, not the cause”
of China’s influence on campuses. They
spoke anonymously to protect their
families from retribution.
Christopher Hughes, a professor of
international relations at London
School of Economics, said that univer-
sities needed to be more transparent.
“A good example would be making allagreements public, such as with Confu-
cius Institutes [partnerships with insti-
tutions in China], which are kept secret.”
Asking students to be anonymous
was a slippery slope. “Are we really
going down the route of self-censor-
ship?” he asked.
A government spokeswoman said:
“We must ensure robust procedures are
in place to protect our research,
national security interests and promote
our academic values. This is why the
universities minister called for the
creation of these guidelines this year.”
Britain must safeguard scholarship,
leading article, page 27Food fight A feisty red squirrel leaps to defend its stash of nuts and seeds from a peckish pheasant near Blairgowrie, Perth and Kinross, before deciding to back off
Police ‘let Janner off’
A retired police officer has told
the Independent Inquiry into
Child Sexual Abuse that a senior
officer ordered him not to arrest
Greville Janner in the 1990s,
when he was the Labour MP for
Leicester West, because he was a
well-known politician. The
former officer said that he had
enough evidence. In 2015 Lord
Janner of Braunstone died at the
age of 87 while awaiting a “trial of
the facts” on 22 abuse charges.Record may get away
A roofer thought to have caught
Britain’s biggest carp may not
claim the record. Wayne
Mansford’s fish was 75lb 2oz but
entered the lake at 15lbs. Purists
say only “wild” fish count. In 2016
an angler had death threats after
trying to claim the record with an
imported carp. Mr Mansford, 38,
of Windsor, said he had already
received “negative feedback”.First Folio fetches £7.6m
A copy of William Shakespeare’s
First Folio has sold for
$9.98 million (£7.66 million) at
auction in New York. Printed in
1623, the book is one of the first
known collections of his plays.
Only six copies are known to be
privately owned. Christie’s said
the sale to Stephan Loewentheil,
a rare book collector, was a
record for any work of literature.Arena security gap
Stewards at the Manchester
Arena did not check the area
where the bomber Salman Abedi
hid in a CCTV blind spot before
his attack in May 2017 as they
thought someone else’s
responsibility. Dave Middleton, of
the security company Showsec,
told the inquiry, now in its sixth
week, that he mentioned
terrorism in his “generic briefing”
to stewards but admitted he might
not have talked about the level of
threat. Abedi killed 22 people and
injured hundreds more.A A A A A A A B
C D E E G G I J
L L M N N N O O
O O P R S T U Y
Solve all five clues using each
letter underneath once only1 Informal ( 6 )
2 Mechanical energy converter ( 6 )
3 Capital city of Colombia (6)
4 “Queen” in official titles (6)
5 Very hot chilli pepper ( 8 )
Quintagram® No 821
Solutions MindGames in Times
Cryptic clues Page 10 of TimesLOUISE PHILLIPS/SWNSSpies have found it more difficult to
trail suspects during the pandemic
because of the empty streets caused by
lockdown, the director-general of MI
revealed yesterday.
Ken McCallum, who took over the
security service in April, also revealed
that would-be terrorists were altering
their plans because there were fewer
crowds to target.
Detailing how MI5’s activities had
changed, Mr McCallum said his officers
spent significant amounts of time on
the near-empty streets and “covert sur-
veillance is not straightforward”.
The agency’s adversaries were
aware that Covid-19 had “turned
the world upside down” and
there was a risk that they would
deploy biological, chemical or
radiological materials in
a future attack, he
warned. The author-
Empty streets make it harder to
follow suspects, says MI5 chief
ities had been alive to that risk for years,
however, and it was not yet “upon us”.
The pandemic is creating fresh work
for the agency as it seeks to protect the
research into a coronavirus vaccine.
In July Britain accused the Russian
state of trying to hack into its vaccine
research. Mr McCallum would not say
whether there had been further at-
tempts by other states but acknowl-
edged that “the global prize of having
the first useable vaccine is a large one”.
Mr McCallum, 45, who studied
mathematics at university and has
worked for MI5 for nearly 25 years, in-
cluding managing counterterrorism
before and during the 2012 London
Olympics, became the youngest head
of the security service when he took
over from Sir Andrew Parker.
He revealed that the security ser-
vice was increasing efforts to counter
hostile activities by China. He
said Russia’s activities caused
the “most aggravation” to the
UK at present but that China,
which had tried to steal UK
intellectual property and
target technology andinfrastructure, represented the greatest
long-term threat. Both were growing in
severity and complexity.
“If the question is which countries’
intelligence services cause the most ag-
gravation to the UK in October 2020,
the answer is Russia,” Mr McCallum,
who led MI5’s response to the novichok
attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury,
said. “If the question is which state will
be shaping our world across the next
decade, presenting big opportunities
and big challenges, the answer is China.
“You might think in terms of the Rus-
sian intelligence services providing
bursts of bad weather, while China is
changing the climate.”
Mr McCallum said MI5 was using ar-
tificial intelligence to mine mountains
of data on phones and computers for
terrorist-related images such as the
Islamic State flag. He said such use of
technology was essential when police
and spies had 14 days to charge or re-
lease suspects, placing them in a “race
against the clock”. Artificial intelli-
gence was also being used to comb
CCTV and would be harnessed to try to
predict the behaviour of suspects, headded. However, large amounts of ac-
tivity still took place in the “real world”.
“We spend our days and nights plant-
ing microphones in attics, doing sur-
veillance on the streets, meeting human
sources, out and about in the real world
— the kind of things I spent my twen-
ties doing,” Mr McCallum said. “We are
completely used to operating in secret
and away from special buildings.”
The intelligence services faced a
“nasty mix” of trying to combat
increased state-backed hostile activity
on top of the terrorism threat, he said.
While Islamist extremism remained
the largest threat by volume, the threat
from the extreme right was increasing.
Of the 27 late-stage terrorist plots dis-
rupted by MI5 and counterterrorism
police since 2017, eight related to the ex-
treme right. Mr McCallum, who is from
Glasgow and is married with children,
said: “Whenever my phone rings late in
the evening, my stomach lurches in
case it is one of those awful moments.”
He pledged to use social media to at-
tract a broader range of recruits and
said Black Lives Matter protests had
prompted discussions about diversity.Fiona Hamilton Crime & Security Editor
Foreign interference on campuses is ‘national security risk’
Continued from page 1
Chatham House rules to seminars, for-
bidding anyone from disclosing the
source of what was said, or allow stu-
dents to submit coursework anony-
mously. They could also ask students to
be anonymous online or attend semi-
nars without revealing their identities.
The guidance says that universities
should not agree international partner-
ships without a clear “exit strategy”. It
warns: “Failure to manage security-
related risks may result in serious
consequences — financial, legal, and
reputational. In some cases, conse-
quences may be felt beyond your insti-
Ken McCallum spoke
about MI5’s use of
artificial intelligence