LONDON: Western countries risk losing control of technologies that are key to internet security and economic prosperity to nations like China and Russia if they don’t act to deal with the threat, one of the UK’s top spy chiefs warned.
“Significant technology leadership is moving east” and causing a conflict of interests and values, Jeremy Fleming, director of government electronic surveillance agency GCHQ, said in a speech.
Singling out China as a particular threat, he said the country’s “size and technological weight means that it has the potential to control the global operating system.”
China is an early adopter of emerging technologies but it also has a “competing vision for the future of cyberspace,” and it’s playing an influential role in the debate around international rules and standards, he said.
He raised the possibility of countries with “illiberal values” like China building them into technical standards that the world ends up relying on, and using their state power to control and dominate technology markets, turning them into arenas of geopolitical competition.
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