It's common knowledge that each country has its own intelligence agencies that monitor, or "spy", on areas around the world, and are extremely secretive about what they do. But it hasn't always been known that some of these agencies work together and share their information and intelligence. Until 2010, when the world learned about the true extent of the UKUSA agreement and 5 Eyes alliance.
History of the 5 Eyes
In WWII, FDR and Winston Churchill wrote a joint declaration called The Atlantic Charter, which spelled out their goals for international relations in 1941. It had 8 main points, neither nation would increase its power, not territory expansions, to allow people's rights to choose their own government where that was taken from them, equal access to trade and materials, promote worldwide peace, improve standards of living, allow free seas, and potential aggressors will be disarmed until a sense of general security is achieved. This charter paved the way for the UKUSA Agreement, which was formally signed on March 5, 1946. The UKUSA agreement was in practice between the 2 countries since 1943, when the USA and the UK agreed to share intelligence in order to help the US troops in Europe. When it was signed, it was to allow for post-war intelligence cooperation between the 2 countries, but was heavily classified for decades. Adding Canada in 1948 then Australia and New Zealand in 1956, it was known as "5 Eyes" to those involved as a shorthand, which eventually stuck. Each country involved has about 3-5 agencies involved in human intelligence, military intelligence, and other information.
Five Eyes has been a top-secret alliance between the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand gathering information to aid each other in every conflict since its inception. During the Cold War, Five Eyes was used to monitor Soviet communications and military operations in and around Soviet or communist regions. For the British, 5 Eyes aided in tracking Soviet submarines, especially ones carrying ballistic missiles in the Northern Atlantic Ocean. The US utilized the international cooperation by using British outposts in regions that were formally in Britain's intelligence sphere, especially the Middle East. During the Cold War, the ECHELON program was created as a way of surveilling Soviet military and diplomatic communications, but has grown into a worldwide surveillance network today. The ECHELON program relied on noting traffic that was deemed as suspicious and gathered the information, and originally used satellites for its data-gathering. This program is one of the most extensive surveillance networks in the world, as it is still in operation today, having adapted to the internet and today's forms of online communication. There are multiple collection sites around the world, tasked with gathering information from different regions, looking for key words and phrases to label people and organizations as suspicious or needing to be monitored. Since the Cold War, 5 Eyes has been used in fighting the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, overthrowing governments in the Middle East and Central/Southern America, the war on terror, and more that have not been declassified yet.
5 Eyes In Recent Times
In 2010, the entire UKUSA Agreement was declassified to the public, exposing the 5 Eyes to the general public. Prompting discussion on the legality of 5 Eyes' operations, but that discussion grew in 2013 with Edward Snowden. Snowden, a former NSA consultant and whistleblower, leaked to the public the extent of government monitoring, both foreign and domestic. When discussing 5 Eyes, Snowden describes it as a “supra-national intelligence organization that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries”. He exposed that the countries involved would monitor its own citizens and each other's, to bypass any domestic restrictions on government surveillance of its own citizens. This angered many people in these countries as they had previously believed that the US government was only spying on foreign citizens, not their own. In recent years, 5 Eyes is still being used to monitor citizens and organizations of different countries, but also tech companies and providers such as, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Visa, Facebook, Apple, and YouTube. In monitoring people and organizations, 5 Eyes has now adapted to surveilling different internet communications such as emails, texts, fax, and even phone calls. Agencies and governments still maintain that the surveillance has been necessary for national security.
5 Eyes is still in operation today, and bigger than ever as well. Now with alliances known as the 9 Eyes and 14 Eyes have been created, but it is not known exactly when these were formed. The 9 Eyes is comprised of the 5 Eyes, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. The 14 Eyes is made up of the 9 Eyes, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Sweden. There are also coalitions between the 5 Eyes and certain countries to monitor different regions of the world. Like the Five Eyes plus 3 against China and Russia, with France, Germany, and Japan to watch suspicious military advancements by China and Russia since 2018. There is also the Five Eyes plus 3 against North Korea, with France, Japan, and South Korea to monitor North Korean military movements and communications. In 2020, India began to work with the 5 Eyes in an effort to get tech companies to allow a "backdoor" access point on encrypted devices governments cannot already get into.
Each country in the 5 Eyes has certain regions of the world they are responsible for monitoring, but are not limited to only those ares. For example, the US is tasked with surveilling the Middle east, China, Russia, Africa, and the Caribbean. It is also believed that today the 5 Eyes has become more focused on monitoring potential and ongoing human rights abuses around the world, such as the Uyghur's treatment in Xinjiang region of China.
Response
Since being exposed by Snowden, the 5 Eyes and its governments have faced ongoing public backlash over privacy rights of its citizens as they believe it to be a massive violation of basic human rights. So far there is little legislation restricting governments access to information, and it is difficult to accurately track which country is monitoring which. In 2016 however, the Investigatory Powers Act was written in the UK, which would expand the current legal limitations of their intelligence community's surveillance over electronic mediums. Allowing for the intelligence agencies to have more control over what they can monitor, and was faced with heavy public backlash including petitions for it to be repealed. It was amended in 2018 after a UK high court deemed it was in violation of an E.U. law. While the 5 Eyes has done good in preventing possibly disastrous conflicts, and helped reach peace in others, it cannot be ignored the gross violation of privacy rights and basic human rights these governments have committed on their own citizens.
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