A senior MP has claimed that spies at GCHQ told him parliament’s email system was less secure than Google’s gmail service as he warned that China was attacking the UK’s democracy.
Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, said that more needed to be done by parliament and the government to defend democracy and freedom of speech.
Tugendhat, who was targeted with sanctions by Beijing in retaliation for British measures imposed over human rights abuses in Xinjiang province, claimed to have been the victim of Chinese “psyops” — psychological operations — including spoof emails to fellow MPs.
He said: “I was told by friends at GCHQ — not formally, I admit — that I was better off sticking to gmail rather than using the parliamentary system because it was more secure.
“Frankly, that tells you the level of security and the priority we are giving to democracy in the United Kingdom.”
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Officials said that the Westminster email system offered significantly greater protection than external providers, and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said that MPs should continue to rely on it.
An urgent question was granted in the Commons yesterday after Beijing imposed sanctions against nine British critics — including five MPs and two peers — banning them from entering China and Hong Kong.
Tugendhat said: “The sanctions that the UK government has applied on China are being applied for violations of human rights — actions, in other words. Actually brutalising people, actually murdering people, actually doing physical harm to people. The sanctions China has applied are for speaking. They are for calling out the violation of Chinese citizens, or the brutality towards the Chinese Uighur population.”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today, Tugendhat said that emails were circulated last week purporting to be from him and falsely claiming he had resigned from the foreign affairs committee. The email was understood to have come from a personal AOL account impersonating Tugendhat, rather than his parliamentary email address. “This is what China's psyops looks like,” he said.
Many other cyberattacks had been perpetrated on him or others, including attacks of impersonation and attacks on certain accounts, he said.
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A parliamentary spokesman said: “We have robust cybersecurity measures in place and work closely with partners in the National Cyber Security Centre. In line with guidance from the NCSC we would always encourage MPs to use parliamentary emails, which offers significantly higher levels of security than external providers.” An NCSC spokesman said the parliamentary system followed best practice and that “MPs should continue to use it”.
During the urgent question, the Conservative former minister Tim Loughton called the sanctions placed on him and other parliamentarians by China “laughable”. The Foreign Office minister Nigel Adams said that the government “stands in complete solidarity with those sanctioned by China”.
