China’s big threat to internet, by GCHQ spy chief

ONE of the UK’s spy chiefs said yesterday that China was threatening the future of the internet and that the West was facing a ‘moment of reckoning’.

The deputy director of strategy at GCHQ, who was named only as Ann S,

told Cheltenham Science Festival: ‘We in the West have been fortunate that a lot of the technology which has driven the internet has been informed by Western liberal values, democratic values, but that is not going to be the picture going forward. So we can see that there is a big shift to the East. There is a potential clash of values there.’

She added that Beijing’s values ‘are unlike the values that we hold to be important in the West.’ Last year, Dominic Raab, the then Foreign Secretary, said China was engaged in ‘systematic cyber sabotage’.

In the past China erased social media accounts of independent news providers for ‘spreading politically harmful information, maliciously falsifying (Communist) party history, slandering heroes and defaming the nation’s image’.