London: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his team have been given burner phones and fresh sim cards during their China visit. They are also using temporary email addresses to prevent devices being loaded with spyware or UK government servers being hacked into, a report has stated.
“The employment of such tactics may sound dramatic but they are par for the course in an age of digital espionage and information security. Burner phones, for example, are routinely used by No 10 on some trips abroad – at G20 the summits in Brazil in 2024 and South Africa in 2025, for example – though not on visits to allied nations or Five Eyes intelligence partners. For visits to China these precautions have been standard for at least a decade, such is the expectation that Beijing will eavesdrop and monitor,” a report in UK’s leading daily ‘The Guardian’ stated.
Ahead of her visit to China in 2018, Theresa May, when she served as the UK PM, was warned to get dressed under the duvet to ensure that spy cameras would not shoot her without any clothes on, the report mentioned. This advice was given usually by officials to all those visiting China eight years back. Concerns about peeping tom surveillance are relevant for those travelling in the official entourage or business and press delegations staying in hotels.
“There was a well-worn routine in places like Shenzhen that foreigners from the West would be assigned the same rooms so they wouldn’t have to move the equipment,” The Guardian quoted a former senior British intelligence official as saying.
Gordon Brown’s aide was a victim of a honey trap when the former serving as UK PM was on a visit to China in 2008. The male aid met a Chinese woman at a lively hotel disco in Shanghai and left with her and the next day, he reported that his mobile phone was missing, the report revealed.
The Guardian stated, “Part of the standard security guidance given to ministers and their aides reflects this incident. “The rest of the advice,” the senior security official said, ‘was warning middle-aged men that if an attractive young Chinese woman appeared interested in you, she probably wasn’t’.”
David Cameron visited China as UK PM in 2013. A former aide recalled that China had insisted on providing personal protection officer “over six-and-a-half-foot tall” to follow UK PM and his team as closely as reasonably possible.
“The practice, again, is relatively standard, but it offered an obvious possibility for low level information gathering. ‘At the end of the trip after pretending he couldn’t speak or understand, at the plane he said goodbye and safe travels in perfect English,’ they recalled, presumably as a reminder they were being watched. General guidance, according to one British official who visited Beijing, “is that everything is bugged” and the only area for sensitive or secret conversations and debriefs is the secure compartment in the British embassy,” The Guardian report mentioned.
Similar guidelines are applicable when UK leaders meet Chinese leaders or officials at international summits or when they visit China’s diplomatic premises in London or elsewhere. A former adviser of James Cleverly, who served as UK’s Foreign Secretary, recalled that he and his team did not take their mobile phones into the Chinese consulate during the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Cleverly and his team kept the mobile phones in a lead-lined bag in the hands of officials who did not go inside the diplomatic building, the report further revealed.
(IANS)
