Russia ‘targets UK school children as proxies for hostile acts'

Times

18 hours ago

British school children are being targeted by Russia as it seeks to recruit 'proxies' to carry out hostilities in the UK, the Met Police's counterterror chiefs have warned.
Commander Dominic Murphy said that he had seen a surge in the number of hostile state operations, with Russia and Iran being largely responsible.
He said that Russia was paying proxies — youngsters, petty criminals and disenfranchised members of the public — to carry out activities on British soil.
Vicki Evans, counterterrorism policing's senior national coordinator, said that there had been ten charges under the National Security Act since it came into force in December 2023. The youngest was a child in their mid-teens.
Murphy pointed to a case last week where three men were found guilty of an arson attack on a London warehouse linked to Ukraine on behalf of a Russian mercenary group.
Two further men, Dylan Earl, 20, and Jake Reeves, 23, were found to have orchestrated the attack on behalf of the Wagner group and had earlier admitted aggravated arson.
Evans said that criminal proxies were becoming a 'prevalent' tactic and often involved small amounts of money for people tasked to do 'unwittingly significant actions' on behalf of hostile states.
She told of concern that young people, who may not be ideologically aligned to the views of a hostile state, were being encouraged online to carry out activities without knowing the implications.
Evans urged people to be mindful of the risks, and added: 'We really encourage people, parents, teachers, professionals, just to be inquisitive.
'If they're concerned, ask those questions, and if they think there's something they need to be concerned about, seek help and act, because we want to make sure that we're protecting people from inadvertently being drawn in this sort of activity.'
She went on: 'Espionage operations target our democracy, target our institutions, they threaten to fracture public trust here in our communities and threaten to target the things that underpin our daily life and our way of life.'
The UK terror watchdog has called for a change in the law to ban the creation or possession of computer programmes that are used to stir up racial or religious hatred.
Jonathan Hall KC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said that the threat of chatbots to radicalise youngsters poses a major challenge to the UK's counterterrorism authorities. He said the use of machine-learning technology such as generative AI will be used by terrorists to promote their ideologies and plan atrocities.
Outlining the landscape of terror threats facing the UK, Hall said that AI chatbots could be used for propaganda purposes, attack planning and spreading disinformation, which may trigger acts of terrorist violence.
He said: 'Generative artificial intelligence's ability to create text, images and sounds will be exploited by terrorists.'
Terrorist groups could use AI to generate propaganda images or translate text into multiple languages, Hall warned. The technology could be used to produce deepfakes to bring 'terrorist leaders or notorious killers back from the dead' to spread their message again.
Hall said that the most striking offence influenced by chatbots was the case of Jaswant Singh Chail, who climbed into the grounds of Windsor Castle in 2021 armed with a crossbow intending to kill the Queen. The attack was triggered by his AI-generated chatbot 'girlfriend' Sarai.
Hall said that it was an example of the way in which chatbots can mirror and replace the companionship that humans offer, and offer not only guidance but also approval and reassurance of a particular action.
The watchdog called for new laws to be introduced to ban the creation of chatbots to spread hatred based on race or religion or designed to recruit extremists and mount terror attacks.