Top UK spy chief: West risks loss of tech control

LONDON — Western countries risk losing control of technologies that are key to internet security and economic prosperity to nations such as China and Russia if they don’t act to deal with the threat, one of the U.K.’s top spy chiefs warned Friday.

“Significant technology leadership is moving east” and causing a conflict of interests and values, Jeremy Fleming, director of government electronic surveillance agency GCHQ, said in a speech.

Singling out China as a particular threat, he said the country’s “size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system.”

China is an early adopter of emerging technologies, but it also has a “competing vision for the future of cyberspace,” and it’s playing an influential role in the debate around international rules and standards, he said.

Fleming raised the possibility of countries with “illiberal values” such as China building them into technical standards that the world ends up relying on, and using their state power to control and dominate technology markets, turning them into arenas of geopolitical competition.

Left unchecked, foreign adversaries could threaten the design and freedom of the internet, Fleming said.

He citied as examples the security for emerging technologies such as “smart city” sensors used to manage services more efficiently or digital currencies, saying they could be hardwired for data collection or other intrusive capabilities that go against open and democratic societies.

Britain and other Western countries face “a moment of reckoning,” Fleming said in his speech at Imperial College London.