When Mike Burgess – the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) – speaks, politicians/security analysts/the media listen… And yesterday was a big occasion with the heads of the ‘Five Eyes’ (aka US, Canada, the UK, and New Zealand) security agencies coming together in California. Cue an unprecedented press conference to call out corporate theft by Chinese spies… Burgess says China is engaged in “the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history”. The UK’s MI5 boss Ken McCallum says tech firms are hot targets and that 20,000 Britons have been approached by Chinese spies on LinkedIn. Not that Chinese President Xi Jinping is bothered – he’s hanging out with his “dear friend”/Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing…