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Security consultants and any ‘security professionals’ might be breaking the National Security Act 2023 if they do business with Russia, Iran and China, or ‘for any foreign power where the activity is damaging to the safety or interests of the UK’.
That comes from the Home Office’s published guidance, ‘Complying with the National Security Act 2023: security professionals’. In an accompanying comment, the Home Office’s Security Minister Dan Jarvis said: “Working in private security is vital, but foreign states are increasingly looking to the industry as a tool to carry out their dirty work โ to degrade our security, undermine our values and damage our livelihoods.
“I urge security professionals to take caution to protect the UK and themselves by fully checking and understanding who they are working for. If they donโt, they seriously risk breaking the law and aiding states who seek nothing more than to harm this country and who have no concern for the individuals they employ. The threats malign actors pose to our country are expanding, in scale and scope. We must adapt with them, and the private security sector has a pivotal role to play in shutting them out of the UK, to which I thank them.”
Guidance in detail
To give more detail, the guidance states that the ‘malign activity’ may be foreign governments seeking info about dissidents who are living in exile in the UK; or ‘protected or sensitive information’, such as trade secrets, whether from academia, research institutions or industry; or technical details, ‘potential vulnerabilities, including single points of failure’ about critical infrastructure or supply chains that may be exploited. The three are spelt out in (slightly) more detail in three ‘scenarios’ at the end of the document: an investigator asked to collect personal information on ‘a well-known dissident’; a close protection operative for the owner of a prominent defence contractor is offered a bribe ‘to report back conversations’ about contracts; and a consultancy legitimate work by a foreign government was also ‘asked to disclose measures used to protected UK government buildings’.
The offence
The Act came into force last month; the offences include if you are in fact working for a foreign intelligence service. Among the outcomes that may constitute an offence are ‘misinformation or disinformation intended to sow discord’ as a result of information you provide.
Covert
The guidance document of eight pages admits that the approach by foreigners may be covert; and that a security person ought to take ‘reasonable precautions’; the document further admits that it can only help in reducing such risk, ‘and will not be able to eliminate it altogether’.
What to do
The Home Office says that if due diligence checks have led someone to suspect the involvement of a state when they have been approached, or if they realise only after taking on work, they should report to Counter Terrorism Policing in confidence on their Anti-Terrorism Hotline on 0800 789321 or report it online through the official ACT (Action Counters Terrorism) website; as the guidance points out, ‘Counter Terrorism Policing are responsible for responding to threats from hostile states as well as terrorism’. The Act also introduces a Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS), which has yet to be detailed.
Whgere to turn
As for where to get further guidance, the document points you to the UK official National Protective Security Authority (NPSA), which sets out threats such as espionage (physical world and cyber).
