Late last year, a Ph.D. student named Yuekang Li was refused a study visa to enter Canada. Why? Canada’s Federal Court was concerned about research security and that he could be “targeted and coerced into providing information that would be detrimental to Canada.”
Li wasn’t the only one. Earlier this month, Iranian computer engineering student Reza Jahantigh was denied a visa to study for his Ph.D. in Canada because of his previous service in the Iranian military. Some observers have called the decisions “deeply unhelpful”, and said they risked the prospects of future international students coming to Canada.
Despite such criticisms, Canada is leading an international movement for stricter “research security” — the idea of protecting certain university courses and research programs from espionage, foreign interference, and technology theft.
While countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands are moving swiftly to make their research more secure, Australia lags behind. And our need for research security is only set to grow.
Rules around the world
In the US, applicants for federal funding must comply with strict guidelines on disclosing both local and foreign partners. Canada has banned research collaborations with foreign entities connected with Chinese, Russian, or Iranian military or intelligence agencies.
The UK even funds specific university research into how they secure their work. The Netherlands, a world leader with its own brand of “knowledge security,” has even proposed a controversial law to security-screen every foreign researcher, irrespective of their home country.
What is Australia doing to protect its research security?
In Australia, research security is a contentious topic. We don’t recognize the term, we don’t talk about it, and it doesn’t appear in parliamentary press releases. But there are real threats to our universities.
A parliamentary inquiry in 2022 heard stories of coercion, suppression, and foreign interference on almost every Australian campus. Two years on, nearly none of the inquiry’s recommendations have been ultimately adopted.
Last year, my colleagues and I found Australia has more than 3,000 research agreements with China, some of which might pose significant security risks. Only a few months ago, the Five Eyes — composed of the U.S., UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia intelligence agencies— called China an “unprecedented threat” to innovative research worldwide.
We should be worried. Under the AUKUS agreement, Australia is about to receive some of the most closely guarded military secrets in the world courtesy of the US — nuclear-powered submarines.
After that, we will share breakthroughs in military technologies such as robotics, hypersonic missiles, and quantum computers. The government has even allocated thousands of new university positions to support AUKUS.
Some action, but not enough
But Australia hasn’t taken a really good look at what needs to be done to keep those secrets safe.
We aren’t entirely defenseless. ASIO has published a booklet called Collaborate with Care, which gives researchers tips on ensuring their research isn’t compromised. One of Australia’s biggest funding bodies, the Australian Research Council, recently published its Countering Foreign Interference Framework.
But the steps outlined in those publications are all voluntary, and pale in comparison with those of our international allies. So what will it take for Australia to reconsider its position on research security?
Does Australia need a scandal?
Put simply, Australia seems to need a proper research security scandal in one of its universities.
The U.S. has a long history of research security scandals. One of the worst was the alleged theft of “military grade meta-materials” by Chinese entrepreneur and one-time graduate student Ruopeng Liu from Duke University in 2009.
In 2018, Hao Zhang — a professor at China’s Tianjin University — was arrested (and later convicted) for stealing semiconductor technology from U.S. businesses. In 2021, Harvard professor Charles Lieber — once considered a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry — was convicted of fraud for lying about payments he received to be a “strategic scientist” for foreign universities.
Canada, too, has had its scandals. In 2021, doctors Xiangguo Qiu and Keding Cheng were fired by Canada’s National Microbiology Lab and lost their security clearances for allegedly sharing virus samples with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. In 2023, Norwegian officials arrested a Russian intelligence agent named Mikhail Mikushin, who had posed for years as a Canadian university academic.
Close calls
In Australia, we’ve come close. Just two years ago, ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess told Five Eyes his agency had expelled a visiting professor who had been given “money and a shopping list of intelligence requirements” by Chinese intelligence. Then, last year, ASIO warned that foreign intelligence agents had been told to “aggressively seek” and steal AUKUS secrets from Australia.
So perhaps we should act now, before we get a scandal to spur us into action.
We could have open, honest, and frank discussions between universities and our intelligence services. We could craft a robust research security policy hand-in-hand between academia and government. We could look at what works worldwide, analyze it, critique it, and see if it works here.
Otherwise, Australia will lose the very secrets we have just been entrusted to keep.
Brendan Walker-Munro, Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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