A joint public warning issued by “Five Eyes,” an alliance between the intelligence agencies of five anglophone countries including the U.K. and U.S., says China-linked spies are using job boards to pry classified information or other secrets out of its targets.
The report claims China’s military intelligence operation is finding people in places like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Upwork, and offering what is essentially gig work, but then pressuring applicants to do sketchier and sketchier things to keep their paychecks coming—in this case potentially committing espionage.
Five Eyes claims that those who have take these gigs have already been subject to “criminal prosecutions, job losses, and security-clearance revocation.” The report warns of the potential for “prosecution under national laws such as those relating to espionage.”
It’s a disquieting new overlap between being scammed and being recruited as a leaker, which, while it can get you a lengthy prison sentence or even the death penalty for crimes against your country, does at least have a history of paying well. For instance, before being imprisoned for the rest of his life, FBI agent and KGB mole Robert Hanssen, for instance, received $1.4 million, according to the FBI.
By contrast, information sources roped in through online job platforms are getting “anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per report,” according to Five Eyes, although amounts may be higher for “increasingly sensitive information.” It’s depressing to imagine what people are allegedly revealing for what sound like four-figure payouts at best.
These job postings are attached to fake companies, supposedly based in countries other than China who are looking for analysts with expertise in foreign policy or defense. Targets apparently include people with intelligence and military jobs that would merit clearance, along with “academics, journalists, freelance writers, [and] think tank employees,” the report says. There’s an interview, in which subjects are asked questions meant to tease out what sort of access they might have. They then get asked to write mundane reports as a test, on topics like, “China’s bilateral relations, the Indo-Pacific region and related defence issues, or international trade.”
Then, the report says things may escalate. Applicants are told that the client needs something a little juicier, and then communications can shift to an encrypted chat platform.
If you’re familiar with less consequential scams on places like Upwork, this may sound familiar. Gig workers on Upwork are urged never to migrate communications to a different platform, where the rules and guidelines of the job board can’t protect them. In some cases an Upwork scam might be relatively benign—an attempt to, say, weasel out of paying a freelance writer. The Five Eyes report, meanwhile, claims, “Certain types of data can place the lives of frontline military or other personnel at risk, can weaken our economic prosperity, and enable interference in our democratic processes.”
It’s worth dwelling for a moment on the gray areas mentioned in the report. It notes that applicants may have no actual access to secrets, but that “even unclassified information on government policy, or on military strategy, capabilities and installations, can be collected and combined with more sensitive reporting to form a comprehensive operational picture.”
If one grants that the report’s analysis is sound, and that this really is a single, China-based spy operation aimed at obtaining military secrets, one would hope that not everyone who gets roped into it gets fired as a government contractor, loses security clearance, or gets prosecuted. As the report says, some of this problematic information is unclassified, and it sounds like some of these applicants are just writing boring essays about international trade for a few hundred dollars.
Perhaps the members of Five Eyes are the ones who need a wake-up call here. These are lean times, so it might be a good idea to pay people well enough that they don’t feel the need to browse for side gigs on Indeed and LinkedIn. The security of the U.S., the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia may depend on analysts getting some dang raises.
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