The UK must be prepared for the possibility of foreign interference during the July 4 general election, a senior MP has warned PM Rishi Sunak. Former Labour deputy leader Dame Margaret Beckett wrote to the prime minister as chair of the parliamentary Joint Committee on national security strategy. The election announcement on May 22 meant the committee of MPs and peers hasn’t got to question Home Office minister Tom Tugendhat and (on the tech side) minister Michelle Donelan.
Beckett’s letter named China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as countries seeking to so interfere. The risks Beckett listed were cyber attacks against institutions (including ransomware, which the committee published a report about in December); the cyber targeting of ‘high profile individuals’ for info the attackers could exploit; and disinformation spread online, such as through generative AI to create fake audio and video. Such ‘deepfakes’ have the potential ‘to mislead the public and cause disorder’, Beckett wrote. As for how the public should spot such fakes, Beckett noted that the Government’s anti-fraud campaign ‘appears not to educate the public on how to identify deepfakes’.
She called on the Electoral Commission (which in August 2023 admitted it had been ‘the subject of a complex cyber attack’) to issue public guidance on how to spot deepfakes and other such mis- and dis-information online.
Only a day before Mr Sunak called the election, Beckett raised her committee’s concern about ‘huge disparity in approaches and attitudes to managing harmful digital content in the written evidence submissions we have received across companies from X, TikTok, Snap and Meta to Microsoft and Google’.
Beckett commented then: “Much of the written evidence that was submitted shows – with few and notable exceptions – an uncoordinated, silo-ed approach to the many potential threats and harms facing UK and global democracy. The cover of free speech does not cover untruthful or harmful speech, and it does not give tech media companies a get-out-free card for accountability for information propagated on their platforms.
“Though we have not concluded our inquiry or come to our recommendations, there is far too little evidence from global commercial operations of the foresight we expected: proactively anticipating and developing transparent, independently verifiable and accountable policies to manage the unique threats in a year such as this. There is far too little evidence of the learning and cooperation necessary for an effective response to a sophisticated and evolving threat, of the kind the Committee described in our report on ransomware earlier this year.”
As for the communications regulator Ofcom that under the Online Safety Act is the regulator tasked with handling ‘online harms’, it gave the committee oral evidence of their new powers to counter online threats – ‘powers that will likely only come into effect after our elections’, Beckett pointed out.
Speaking
The Home Secretary’s Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC is among the invited speakers at the Counter Terror Expo conference next month at Excel in London Docklands; on day two of two, June 19. He’s also speaking at the defence and security think-tank RUSI on the UK’s legal response to overseas meddling, from assassination and election interference to disinformation and diaspora intimidation, on July 23.
Photo ID
Meanwhile, the Electoral Commission has published a reminder that the first time at a UK general election, those voting at a polling station will need to show photo ID. You can register at www.gov.uk/register-to-vote by June 18. Voters can choose whether to vote at a polling station, by post or by proxy.
