Cross was specifically comparing the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance (SNSO) to similar laws in the other Anglo-American jurisdictions. He had less to say about the earlier national security law initiated by the mainland to cover Hong Kong.

It turns out a good deal of the SNSO was actually modelled on British legislation. For example, the offence of using computers or other electronic systems to endanger national security is mostly based on the UK’s Computer Misuse Act 1990, which prohibits any person from using such devices to threaten national security.

In both jurisdictions, Cross said, the respective laws target a hacker who “steals classified national security information, or gains control over strategic governmental electronic systems”. However, the maximum sentence for the offence is 20 years here whereas in the United Kingdom, it’s life imprisonment.

The laws in both places allow extending the detention of suspects and restricting their access to lawyers provided there are reasonable grounds that not doing so might interfere with an investigation or threaten national security.

Again, the provisions against spying or espionage are very similar in both jurisdictions. The one big difference is that Hong Kong has 20 years for a maximum sentence while in the UK, someone so convicted could be jailed for life.

In Canada and Singapore, acts of espionage may receive up to 14 years in jail, in Australia the maximum is life imprisonment and in the United States, life imprisonment or the death penalty.

And of course, every country criminalises the theft of state secrets.

Treason or the betrayal of one’s country is pretty much the same in Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, Singapore, the UK and the US. You can be jailed for life in all these places, but in Singapore and the US, you may also be executed.

One constant Anglo-American criticism has been the extraterritorial application of the SNSO, as if it were foreign to their own nationality security laws. This is especially laughable in the case of the US. Julian Assange, anyone? At least his charges were based on the Espionage Act, an obscure first world war-era law. Many other non-security US laws, including commercial ones, have extraterritorial application, or “transnational repression”, as the US State Department calls it when it comes to describing Hong Kong’s new security law. Just ask Meng Wanzhou of Huawei and her lawyers – they know all about that.

Many people around the world just might call such American “transnational repression” (neo-) imperialism under the guise of pseudo-legality.

In the case of the UK, the National Security Act 2023 has not only created new offences such as sabotage, espionage and foreign interference, they are also given extraterritorial application.

“It specifically provides that if those offences are committed in a place outside the UK, the person responsible is prosecutable, whatever their nationality,” Cross said. Hong Kong has followed the British example. Perhaps our former colonial masters should be flattered, rather than critical.

There is specifically the doctrine of “the protective principle”. As Cross observed, that is the application of extraterritoriality against “individuals of whatever nationality whose activities elsewhere endanger its [a country’s] national interests”.

“In Australia, the protective principle has been incorporated into the national security laws covering espionage and foreign interference,” he said. “In Canada, it has been deployed to combat espionage and treason. It is, therefore, entirely natural that it has also been included in the SNSO.”

The definition of sabotage endangering national security is also similar in both the UK and Hong Kong. The city’s “external interference” provisions are akin to the UK’s foreign interference law. According to Cross, the Hong Kong offence citing “improper means” follows closely the “prohibited conduct” stated in the parallel UK offence. The maximum jail term of 14 years is the same in both jurisdictions.

But the UK’s is more drastic. Hong Kong’s external interference law requires intent, while the UK’s foreign interference law introduces a lower test, “and a person can be prosecuted if he is simply ‘reckless’.”

Australia is well ahead of Hong Kong. In 2018, it introduced a sabotage offence into its National Security Legislation Amendment (Espionage and Foreign Interference) Act, which prohibits all forms of sabotage activities including those against attempts to introduce vulnerability into public infrastructure that would threaten national security.

Thanks to Cross, next time I hear “Five Eyes” pundits and politicians rounding on the city’s security laws, I will just roll my eyes and laugh in their faces.