D B E R F A E I N D

In a 2018 submission to the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee (FASC), Universities UK (the representative body for British universities) said its “working assumption is that the most 1 ‘Update to the IP Commission Report; The Theft of American Intellectual Property: Reassessments of the Challenge and United States Policy’, The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Prope. [...] While, in February 2020, Christopher Wray, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), said that the CCP “use some Chinese students in the US as non-traditional collectors of our intellectual property.” 10 These events have thrown a sudden light on the security arrangements adopted by the allies of the US, including the UK. [...] The Academic Technology Approval Scheme (ATAS), the regulatory framework that is used to face the threat of IP theft, emerged from the Voluntary Vetting Scheme (VVS) which was created in the 1990s as a mechanism to prevent Saddam Hussein, the then dictator of Iraq, from acquiring expertise in the development and delivery of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). [...] This begs the question of whether the UK’s current frameworks are capable of managing the conflicting interests of the proper desire to encourage overseas students to study here and the need to mitigate the risk of IP drainage. [...] 89 These universities were: the University of Aberdeen, Aston University, the University of Bath, the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol, the University of Cambridge, Cardiff University, Cranfield University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Exeter, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London, Keele University, King’s College London, Lancast.