Ian Williams Ian Williams

Matt Hancock and the problem with China’s surveillance tech

There can have been no more avid viewers of the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock’s snog and grope than China’s cyber spies, chuckling in some dark room in Beijing and asking each other, how can it have been so easy for somebody to obtain? MI5 seems to be asking itself the same question. Three days after the photographs and video were first published, it appears that nobody knows for sure how it was done. Did it come from somebody with access to the feed who downloaded it or filmed it on the screen with a mobile phone? Or was the camera hacked, because the dirty little secret of these devices is that they are not at all secure?

Equally as worrying is Hancock’s claim that he didn’t even know there was a camera in his office. One report suggests it was part of the smoke detector and appears to have been monitoring the door.

Ian Williams
Written by
Ian Williams
Ian Williams is a former foreign correspondent for Channel 4 News and NBC, and author of Vampire State: The Rise and Fall of the Chinese Economy (Birlinn).

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