And it’s not just Russia. China’s intelligence services, too, avail themselves of all manner of people with legitimate reasons to be in Norway, Finland or any other Western country. For example, PST reports that “Chinese intelligence and influence activities in Norway are carried out to a large extent by intermediaries, Chinese state-owned and private companies, organisations, academic institutions and think tanks.”
So, who is an ordinary academic and businessperson, and who is a spy? For us ordinary citizens, it’s virtually impossible to tell. “On larger [business] projects, state and private Chinese companies often act in consortia. With overlapping ownership interests, the Chinese state is represented throughout the value chain. Often Chinese companies use subcontractors who also have links to the Chinese authorities,” Norway’s military intelligence agency, Etterretningstjenesten, notes in its report.
But the challenge facing Norway and other Western countries isn’t just that foreign spies are becoming harder to identify — it’s also that they’re monitoring everything. “Cooperation in research, business and political relations makes Norway an accessible intelligence and influence target for China,” PST reports.
A couple decades ago, business and academia were havens of transnational collaboration, though IP theft was a headache. But today, researchers are as vulnerable to Russian and Chinese espionage as government institutions, and this will only increase in coming years.
Iran has similarly expansive interests, though it appears to focus on gaining access to cutting-edge technology developed at universities and R&D labs. Of course, Tehran’s objective is to put the technology to military use. According to PST, North Korea also conducts cyber intrusion against Norway to gain access to pioneering research (and, in typical North Korean fashion, to also steal money).
And there’s one part of modern Western society that’s even more vulnerable to espionage and its resulting harms than others : sea-based infrastructure.