D

EXCLUSIVE: China compromised the system used to transfer highly secret data around Whitehall and obtained “vast amounts” of classified government information over a period of many years, Dominic Cummings has said Cummings, who served as a senior adviser to Boris Johnson, said that he and the then prime minister were informed about the breach in 2020. He said he was warned at the time that disclosing some specific details of the breach would be a criminal offence It included “Strap” material — which is the government term for the highest level of classified information. Cummings told The Times: “The Cabinet Secretary said, ‘we have to explain something; there’s been a serious problem’, and he talked through what this was “And it was so bizarre that — not just Boris — a few people in the room were looking around like this. ‘Am I somehow misunderstanding what he’s saying? Because it sounds f***ing crazy’.” He added: “What I’m saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised. “Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they’re not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it.” He said he would be willing to share what he knew about the data breach with MPs and claimed that the most senior officials in Whitehall had covered it up. Cummings refused to say how the system had been breached. “If the MPs want to finally have an inquiry about it, I’d be happy to talk about it,” he said. And many people know that what I’m saying is true and many people will back it up. “And many people know that after the PM was notified about this in 2020, officials from the Cabinet Office then went round telling everybody in the meeting that it was illegal for them to discuss this with the media.” He declined to say how the system was compromised He said that he found the collapse of a China spy trial because the government refused to describe Beijing as a threat to national security as “ludicrous”.  “Anyone who has been read in at a high level with the intelligence services on China knows that the word threat doesn't even begin to cover it,” he said. “The degree of penetration in espionage, in all kinds of operations, penetration of critical national infrastructure, theft of intellectual property, the whole range of things is absolutely extraordinary. A hundred times worse than it's in the public domain. ”Everybody who has been briefed on the critical analyses of these things from the intelligence services knows this is true. The idea that it is somehow a difficult semantic question of whether to define them as a threat or how much of a threat is absolutely puerile nonsense. And everybody in the heart of Whitehall knows this. “The strap system was compromised. All sorts of systems were compromised. Fundamental infrastructure for transferring the most sensitive data around the British state was compromised for a long time. For years.” thetimes.com/article/a0e5efa…